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From: ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: (abort,retry...) *IGNORE* (?)
Message-ID: <6168@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 17 Sep 89 00:58:24 GMT
References: <524@enprt.Wichita.NCR.COM> <216100142@trsvax> <2511DCDC.12036@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 29

In article <2511DCDC.12036@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) writes:
}In article <216100142@trsvax> slimer@trsvax.UUCP writes:
}$  From my understanding of the "abort, retry, ignore?" as traced through
}
}   Ignore does in fact mean "use the data as it no error occurred", and retry
}does in fact mean the obvious "try reading it again".  Abort means that the
}DOS call which generated the error returns with an error code.  The behaviour
}of the application depends on whether or not it checks its DOS calls for errors
}and, if so, how it treats them.

The behavior of the application does not depend on whether it checks for error
returns, since abort unconditionally terminates the running program.
You're thinking of FAIL, which was added as of DOS 3.x.

}The more recent versions of DOS (DOS 4, certainly, and perhaps late versions
}of DOS 3 - I'm not sure and I don't really care) come up with the message
}Abort, retry, fail
}instead of A,R,I.

For many situations, FAIL makes much more sense than IGNORE, so FAIL is used
on DOS versions for which it is available and COMMAND.COM's critical error 
handler (the one that puts up the ARI message by default) knows about FAIL
(DOS 3.1 has FAIL, but COMMAND doesn't give it as an option in the critical
error handler).
-- 
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