Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL!TMPLee
From: TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Unsused bits in Prodos access control field
Message-ID: <900105080759.983860@DOCKMASTER.ARPA>
Date: 5 Jan 90 08:07:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 21

Do any of you Apple gurus out there know of any applications that,
either deliberately or accidentally, set the three "reserved" or
"unused" bits of the access control field on a file to anything other
than zero?  (Give a programmer an unused bit and he'll find a use for
it.)  The reason I ask is that I just listed a full catalogue of my hard
drive (some 1500 files) in a format that includes the access control
field.  Something like five percent of the files had those "unused" bits
set to something other than zero.  A half dozen were FINDER.xxx files,
with a value of 001 and another half dozen were some TML-PASCAL source
(TXT) files, with a value of 100.  (Maybe only half of the FINDER.xxx
and TML files had bad values.)  A couple of months ago I used the Finder
to rearrange a directory of some 50 WP and TXT files so that a couple
dozen of them were pushed down a level into three subdirectories; ALL of
the files in those subdirectories have values of 100 for the unused
bits, but the rest of the files in the parent directory were OK (as were
all other TXT and WP files).  Finally, maybe some 50 instant.music tune
files (most, but not all I have), in several directories, also had
non-zero values.  In this case, all non-zero values except 111 show up.
I'm using system disk 5.0.

TMPLee@Dockmaster.ncsc.mil