Re: Resolved! (was: output buffer in SQR? )

["Fetzik, John" <JFetzik@SANDC.COM>]

Hello,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Thompson-Hall [mailto:david.thompson-hall@DOIT.WISC.EDU]
> Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 10:23 AM
> To: SQR-USERS@list.iex.net
> Subject: Resolved! (was: output buffer in SQR? )
>
>
> OK, it appears the "buffer problem" was not with SQR, but
> with my text editor (and/or it's interaction with Windoze...)
>
> I use TextPad, and one of the reasons I like it is because it
> will tell you when a file you are looking at has changed.
> Since I see it tell me "File X has changed, would you like to
> refresh it?" fairly often, I assumed that it would do so
> every time the file changed.
>
> Well, we all know what assuming does, and this time it did it
> to me.   When
> I ran with a Commo Box open, I could see that the shows were
> there... and then I thought, what if the file is actually not
> refreshing?  So I forced a refresh in TextPad, and viola! the
> "right" data showed up.
>
> I don't know whether this is really a problem with TextPad
> (not catching the file change) or Windows NT (not telling
> TextPad the file changed), but I don't really care....  The
> lesson is, don't attribute problems to applications (SQR)
> when you can blame other applications (TextPad) or the
> Operating System( Windoze).

The problem is with Windows, not TextPad. TextPad will detect changes to the
file, but only when Windows actually decides to write to the disk. Because
of the way that Windows caches disk reads and writes it can be a while
before the write shows up on disk and that information is available to other
programs. Basically under Windows you can not count on the contents of a
file if any program has it open.

John S. Fetzik
S&C Electric Company
773-338-1000 x2763
jfetzik@sandc.com