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From: bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal,comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Re: Statusof a msdos file after dos error
Message-ID: <6520@vice.ICO.TEK.COM>
Date: 14 Dec 90 22:37:56 GMT
References: <2350@bnlux0.bnl.gov> <6032@yang.earlham.edu>
Followup-To: comp.lang.pascal
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
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In article <6032@yang.earlham.edu> peters@yang.earlham.edu writes:
>
>The answer depends on whether you opened the file with reset or rewrite.
>Verify this by opening a file with rewrite, sending
>some text to the file with write/ln, and watching the light on the disk drive;
>it will not glow until the close command is processed.
>

  Close, but not quite true.  There are three cases that will flush a text 
  file in Turbo Pascal:

  1.  As you stated, when the file is closed.
  2.  If you call the flush(var f: text) procedure
  3.  When the internal file buffer fills, which happens every 128 bytes
      if you have not declared your own (larger) text file buffer.

  Any of the above three actions will send all pending data to the file.
  Note that this does *not* guarantee that the operating system will
  know about the data; the file size information and allocation chain in 
  the FAT are not updated until the file is closed.

  Bob Beauchaine
  bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM