Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!decwrl!shelby!lindy!news
From: LC.YRS@forsythe.stanford.edu (Richard Stanton)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: 4DOS problems? (Rather long)
Message-ID: <7874@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 5 Feb 90 21:18:54 GMT
Sender: news@lindy.Stanford.EDU (News Service)
Lines: 32

I am trying 4DOS 2.21, which seems excellent except for a few
strange features.

Firstly, if I have a few commands in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file of the
form ... > nul:, eventually I run out of file control blocks. Using
a utility from SIMTEL, I found that in most cases, an entry is
created under the name NUL: for each occurrence, but not released.
Using COMMAND.COM instead, I do not get the same congestion. No
entries appear under the name NUL:. Does 4DOS forget to clear these
blocks, or is there some advantage to this?

Secondly, I have noticed that occasionally my directories get a
little corrupted. I just performed the following commands:

move cm.doc sent/cm0205.doc
move gg.doc sent/gg0205.doc

The commands were acknowledged, and the files were moved, but the
names in the SENT directory were cm0.doc and gg0.doc. I have also
had this sort of name truncation occur on other occasions.

Finally, and less importantly, I have set the directory format to
mimic the normal DIR format. Usually this works, but occasionally I
get entries of the form name.ext appearing in the middle of a
directory, where all the other names are in the form NAME   EXT.

Has anyone else noticed these oddities, and are they something I
should worry about? Apart from this, the program seems to be
absolutely wonderful, offering all the features I have countless
TSRS for in a single package.

Richard Stanton