TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL (01/05/90)
Do any of you Apple gurus out there know of any applications that, either deliberately or accidentally, set the three "reserved" or "unused" bits of the access control field on a file to anything other than zero? (Give a programmer an unused bit and he'll find a use for it.) The reason I ask is that I just listed a full catalogue of my hard drive (some 1500 files) in a format that includes the access control field. Something like five percent of the files had those "unused" bits set to something other than zero. A half dozen were FINDER.xxx files, with a value of 001 and another half dozen were some TML-PASCAL source (TXT) files, with a value of 100. (Maybe only half of the FINDER.xxx and TML files had bad values.) A couple of months ago I used the Finder to rearrange a directory of some 50 WP and TXT files so that a couple dozen of them were pushed down a level into three subdirectories; ALL of the files in those subdirectories have values of 100 for the unused bits, but the rest of the files in the parent directory were OK (as were all other TXT and WP files). Finally, maybe some 50 instant.music tune files (most, but not all I have), in several directories, also had non-zero values. In this case, all non-zero values except 111 show up. I'm using system disk 5.0. TMPLee@Dockmaster.ncsc.mil
farrier@Apple.COM (Cary Farrier) (01/06/90)
In article <900105080759.983860@DOCKMASTER.ARPA> TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL writes: > [ question about unused bits in the access field ] Which three unused bits are you talking about? There are a total of 10 unused (reserved) bits in the access word. Here are the values for the access word: bits 15-8 reserved, must be zero bit 7 0 = destroy disabled 1 = destroy enabled bit 6 0 = rename disabled 1 = rename enabled bit 5 0 = backup not needed 1 = backup needed bits 4-3 reserved, must be zero bit 2 0 = file is visible 1 = file is invisible bit 1 0 = write disabled 1 = write enabled bit 0 0 = read disabled 1 = read enabled If any other bits are set, they shouldn't be. >TMPLee@Dockmaster.ncsc.mil -- +---------------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Cary Farrier | Internet : farrier@apple.com | | Apple II Systems Software Engineering | UUCP : apple!farrier | | Apple Computer, Inc. | Fax : (408) 974-1704 | | 20525 Mariani Ave. | AppleLink : FARRIER | | Cupertino, CA 95014 | or farrier@applelink.apple.com | +---------------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | I don't speak for Apple Computer, our products do. | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+