roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (03/22/88)
An interesting thing just happened to me. I'm not sure you can really
call it a bug, but it certainly is counter-intuitive (which may be OK for Unix
systems but not for Macs). I was running CricketGraph and NCSA Telnet under
MultiFinder. I used Telnet to ftp a file of numbers to the Mac so it ended up
as a plain text file. I then went into CG, opened the text file (hitting the
"show all text files" box), diddled with it a bit, and saved it with the same
name as before, but in CG "fast" format.
At this point, the file still appeared to be a plain text file; it
still had the generic text file icon and if I double-clicked on it, I got an
"application is busy or missing" dialog box. Closing the folder and
immediately opening it again showed the file with the proper CG icon and
double clicking on it launched CG. Obviously there is some kind of caching of
whatever passes for inodes on a Mac going on and the Finder doesn't see the
changes to the file type until it's forced to by reopening the folder. I've
seen similar stuff happen on NFS file systems when you create or remove files
on the server but the client has the directory in cache and doesn't see the
changes right away.
Interestingly enough, if I run Telnet under MF, I can see files appear
in folders as soon as Telnet reports the transfer is complete, without even
having to click in the folder to activate the Finder.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016