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From: hull@hao.UCAR.EDU (Howard Hull)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Shell 2.06M Vicious bug
Message-ID: <754@hao.UCAR.EDU>
Date: Tue, 23-Jun-87 15:09:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: hao.754
Posted: Tue Jun 23 15:09:07 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jun-87 02:14:54 EDT
References: <8706231137.AA11478@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: High Altitude Obs./NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 39
Summary: may be due to combination of CBM's Copy routine and 'cp' code

In article <8706231137.AA11478@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>, hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Doug Merritt) writes:
> 
> Say you have a diskette that has files with wierd dates. "list" shows
> the dates as Future, shell 2.04M "dir" shows them as negative (e.g.
> "-844-Jan-42 00:-31:-41"). Hey, I don't know how they got that way...
> but I've got two diskettes of commercial software, and three of public
> domain software, that have wierd file dates like this. Anyway, if
> you do "dir" or "echo *" in such a diskette, shell2.06M bombs badly.
> It gurus 810000005, and destroys the restartable ram disk while it's
> at it. Or maybe it just corrupts the free memory list, and AmigaDos
> destroys the ram disk before guru-ing. In any case, there really aren't
> that many kinds of crashes that screw up the RRD, so this is really 
> a bummer.

I did an interesting experiment with the Drew Shell, the 'cp' program
recently put to the net, and two versions of the Amiga 'Copy' command.

Having gotten the 2.06 shell installed, I decided to rebuild my workbench
using the shell and a script file (something it does a great job with!).
While copying some files to RAM:, I noticed that the dates ended up with
very peculiar formats (like the ones you show above).  Since the copy
routine is different in 2.06 I thought it might have a bug in it.  To
co-test the problem, I tried the 'cp' program (recently much discussed
on the net).  It did the same thing - munged dates.  So I tried the XCopy
program (another date copying copy program recently submitted to the net
- sans source).  It worked ok.  So I continued on...

While preening the contents for the source disk, I noticed that my Ram-Handler
was listed as 04-Nov-86 6244 bytes, whereas the 1.2 enhancer had it as
06-Nov-86 6308 bytes.  Hmmmmn.  So I tried the 6308 byte version and shell
"copy" duplicated a file in ram with the original date and no garbage in the
dir date.  Conclusion: check to see that you are not using gamma versions of
the 1.2 Ram-Handler (I got my boogie bad one with the update from Aegis for
the update to Aegis DrawPlus).
							Howard Hull
[If yet unproven concepts are outlawed in the range of discussion...
                 ...Then only the deranged will discuss yet unproven concepts]
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