Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!spar!freeman From: freeman@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Jay Freeman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Bulldozer cursor? Message-ID: <1210@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> Date: 29 Mar 88 22:53:41 GMT Reply-To: freeman@spar.UUCP (Jay Freeman) Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Lines: 28 References: The other week I was running MPW 2.02 under Apple System 5.0 (Finder only, not Multifinder) on my Mac II, when the cursor changed to a tolerable line drawing of a bulldozer and a lot of disc activity began. This situation continued for a minute or so, whereupon the cursor returned to its usual arrow shape and MPW resumed normal operation. I have never seen the like before or since. It could have been a virus doing something wicked, but it has been long enough (several weeks, several hundred hours of active on-time) with no obvious evidence of disaster, that I doubt it. If I had to make a guess, I would say that either MPW or the Finder had decided to do a thorough heap-compaction and was writing out a large temporary file to disc as part of the process; the bulldozer cursor seems appropriate for pushing a big jumbled heap around, and duplicating the heap to disc is a fairly common trick in garbage-collection algorithms. However, I could not find any obvious reference to this behavior in any of my manuals. (On the other hand, considering the size of the MPW manuals and of _Inside_ _Macintosh_, I may well have missed something.) Does anyone either (a) recall seeing this happen or (b) know what was going on? -- Jay Freeman