gautier@LOGNET2.AF.MIL (SrA Richard A. Gautier) (07/26/89)
Dear Users: I have noticed a problem that I seem to keep having with dBase III+. The problem may be a bug, or I may just not know how to do something. First, the circumstances. 1. I downloaded SIMIBM.IDX which is a comma-delimited file of the MS-DOS directories of Simtel-20. 2. I CREATEd a STRUCTURE in dBase III+ based on the statistics given with the file. I believe they were 4,20,12,2,6,1,6,46. 3. I APPENDed FROM SIMIBM.IDX DELIMITED to read in the records. At this point, everything seemed to be going just fine. It read in over 3000 records, and I could BROWSE through them without any problems, whatsoever. 4. Then I decided to do a DIR, and I noticed that the file SIM-IBM.DBF, which is the name of the file I created, and was browsing through was only about 2K in size (The size of a DOS initialized file before it has been closed). 5. So, in order to close the file, I did a QUIT to exit dBASE, and then re-entered it, only to find that SIM-IBM.DBF has stayed the same size, and I had a corrupted database (i.e. You go to BROWSE, and it bypasses about 7 records, and freezes on the Add New Records (Y/N)? Statement) The only way that I could fix this, was to do my APPEND statement, and then either COPY or SORT the data to another file (which closes both this file, and the other file as far as DOS is concerned.) I a loaded to my hard drive. It does the same thing on a Z-184 with the same stats. Does anyone recognize the problem? Know how to solve it? Richard A. Gautier, SrA, USAF...Osan Air Base, Republic of Korea Automatic Message Sending ASP-User not online-- :)
tmoore@LOGNET2.AF.MIL (MSgt Terry Lee Moore) (07/26/89)
Rich, I couldn't duplicate your bug exactly here at home. I did however remember that dbase often does not update the file structure/dir info to the disk until you do something outside of that file. For instance, I use the "use" command with no arguments to close a database file. Then the dir command looks OK. Quit is supposed to take care of file cleanup for you without additional commands. I have had my problems with files that I QUIT out of in programs, etc. So I slways use a close or a close databases before I quit, especially if I have added or changed info in that session. then I call the QUIT command. Works for me. Terry