schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) (01/11/91)
DonUt use the file inspector to look at active files! I was working on WriteNow and just out of curiosity when I had finished the document I wanted to see how much disk space it would take up (I know for instance on the Macintosh, a Microsoft Word 4.0 will take significantly more disk space than a Microsoft Word 3.0 document if the files are small). So without closing the file from WriteNow, I switched to the Workspace, selected the file under the file browser and selected the Inspector under Tools. Well, I got the little spinning disk and thatUs all I ever got. It wasnUt a complete hang. By clicking on the WriteNow document in the background I could bring it to the foreground, but forget anything involving the disk. In other words I couldnUt even execute the Mach shell to kill the process. In fact I couldnUt even power down -- the button wouldnUt respond. I was about to pull the plug when I remembered that the command-tilde. I was about to do that when I came upon the idea of trying to login remotely so I told my roommate to try to login from his computer. Interestingly enough that was allowed, and he killed off the processes from there. I had a feeling that trying to get info on an active file many not work, but I didnUt think it would effectively hang the computer. ShouldnUt the operating system automatically trap these kinds of things and just give you an error message? Another interesting problem... FSCK constantly destroys my files. I got into the ROM monitor at boot and entered the system with BSD -S. I did an FSCK just to see whether there were any problems. It came up saying that a directory was corrupted and asked me whether I wanted to salvage it. Of course I said yes. Then it came up and asked me whether I wanted to relink some stray files. I assumed the problem was because of the corrupted directory so I said yes. I rebooted, and the FSCK came up clean. Cool. So I exited single user mode and got into Workspace and I noticed that I had more free disk space! RCool, maybe FSCK optimized my disk and recovered empty spaceS I thought. Looking around though, I noticed that a whole bunch of my files were gone. Of course in that directory that was supposedly corrupted. Fortunately I had a backup so I put them back on. I rebooted and got into the ROM monitor again, and again FSCK said that the same directory was corrupted. I repeated the procedure and again my files were missing. I repeated it on more time. This time only one file was deleted by FSCK. Wonderful. WhatUs going on? Does anyone know? It doesnUt seem to affect the operation of the system to have the RcorruptedS directory. Should I just assume that FSCK is bullshitting me and never execute it? All the files in question were WriteNow documents. Man, whenUs NextStep 2.01 coming out? (sorry about the apostrophes...) Sam