Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!amdcad!philip From: philip@amdcad.AMD.COM (Philip Freidin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: As if by MAGIC, it doesnt work anymore Keywords: MAGIC,MURPHY Message-ID: <21856@amdcad.AMD.COM> Date: 31 May 88 19:08:18 GMT Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, Ca. Lines: 65 A little problem has happend to me and I dont know what it means. Here is the situation: config.sys has FILES=20 in it only TSR's are CED, RMAP, logimouse MENU and CLICK, and MARK. (none of these do anything with files) MS-DOS is an unmodified version 3.1, has been running fine for atleast a year Disk is maxtor 1140 (120 MB) Application program is 'BIGSORT' a sort program that handles quite large textfiles and does sorting. It does disk based sorting, so memory size is not a limit on the file to be sorted. It opens 8 temporary files. The data file slowly grows as I append data to it each week. It is now about 589K long. This file is fed to BIGSORT, and the output is a sepparate file that is the sort output. I.E. Everything gets sorted each time. I dont keep the result of the previous sort. This software has worked fine up until last sunday. Here's what has happened: It doesnt' work anymore. The program runs out of file handles before it opens all of its temporaries. changing FILES in the config.sys file to 22 makes it work again. Hers's what I've tried: Booted off a write protected floppy, no config.sys or autoexec.bat file, so no TSR's, and virus free version of dos 3.1 and it still crashed. Recompiled BIGSORT, booted off floppy and it crashed. Recompiled BIGSORT, booted off hard disk (with TSR's etc), and it crashed. Changed config.sys to contain FILES=22, booted off hard disk (with TSR's etc) and it worked ok. Cut source data file back to about 340K, (i.e. size of several months ago, used to sort ok) booted off hard disk, it crashed, set FILES=22, and it worked. So: It isn't the copy of DOS. It isn't the TSR's It isn't the BIGSORT program It isn't the size of the data file It isn't the ammount of free space on disk (about 15MB) It doesn't appear to be a virus There is a quick fix that works I don't understand what has happened. Is there anyway to interogate MS-DOS to find out the number of unused file handles? Any help would be appreciated. Philip Freidin.