shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson) (01/25/89)
I'm working on a little utility that might be generally useful and I'd like some suggestions. I normally use 'Avail' to determine if a questionable program has been nice about returning its resources, but I thought something with more rigorous checking might be in order. Such a utility would also be extra useful as a globally availble tool. It might be used as the standard resource checker for BADGE killer demos, for example, so that anyone creating a demo can test their own the same way the BADGE officials will. What I have now just records the state of free memory in the system and the open counts on libraries. Note that this is not a resource "tracking" utility, and it needs to be used under carefully controled circumstances in order to report acurately. What I do is run the program in question once, record the system state, run the same program again, and then check the current state against the saved state. All the deltas should be zero. I ingore the "dos.library" explictly since it's a known offender of the law of conservation of open count. What else should the program check in order to be generally useful? Devices - serial, audio, etc.? Would it be worthwhile to patch the Dos library to count file locks? I have some ideas - I'd just like some feedback. Thanx. -- Stuart Ferguson (shf@well.UUCP) Action by HAVOC