Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Fsfirst/next and lineA question
Message-ID: <1143@atari.UUCP>
Date: 29 Aug 88 21:29:26 GMT
References: <538@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> <539@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Organization: Atari (US) Corporation, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 29

In article <539@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> rob@raksha.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere) writes:
> 
> Some people had a discussion on Malloc/Fsfirst(next)/40folders from
> which I inferred that after doing Fsfirst you should always Fsfnext
> until failure, or you will leave a permanently allocated buffer in
> your wake.  Is this correct?  If not, what is the truth?  Are there
> other allocation fee-churs like this?

You haven't been paying attention, but that may be symptomatic of other
people so I'll reply (again) here.

Fsfirst/Fsnext has NEVER been the culprit in the 40-folder bug.  GEMDOS
has NEVER had a concept of folders which are "in use" versus folders
which are not.  It allocated internal memory for a folder as soon as it
came across it: getting a directory listing of a directory with
subdirectories caused memory to be allocated for those subdirectories.
This memory was NEVER released or reused.

The new GEMDOS (in the impending TOS 1.4 release) *does* have a notion
of "active" folders, as I have described here before.  I totally reworked
Fsfirst/Fsnext so they do NOT contribute to the definition of an "active"
folder, and therefore you do not need to exhaust an Fsfirst in order
to relase any resources it has locked -- there are no such resources.

Go back and read my previous postings for more details.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt