Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu!vkr
From: vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Arp bug?
Keywords: arp crashes taking vd0: with it, and in spite of Gomf2.2
Message-ID: <626@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 24 Jun 88 13:44:44 GMT
Organization: Ohio State Math-Stats Dept
Lines: 29

Let me first tell exactly what happened and give two conjectures:
I got Maple and was playing on a friend's machine. I decided to copy
files onto floppies to see if one can run a crippled Maple with floppies.
[I don't have a hard drive yet. my friend's 2000 does]. I did a 'dir >prt:
maple: all' and got the list an hour later (!) This was without arp. After
I got to my machine, I plooped the floppy with about 135 files with .m
extension and a few directories. With arp (all my boot disks except the
original distribution workbench have arp on them), I did 'dir df1: #[^.]'
I got a list that was strange: not sorted, included the .m files etc.
and then GURU. (No task held requester). I installed GOMF2.2}i and tried again.
No good. I switched to an 1000. Still that GURU. What is going on?

I trust arp pattern matching becuase it works with reasonable sized 
directories. But still ...

The second guess, and my money is on this: arp routines read in all the
file entries before doing pattern matching rather than match patterns one
by one. I.e. instead of doing: ExNext(); PatternMatch(); if (matched) pass the
name along; UnLock(); loop
they do ExNext(); etc loop, UnLock everything. I can live with the latter if
there is no hidden bug coming alive when the data space is >32K or number of
files >127 etc.

A related question: Do FindFirst and FindNext traverse the files in the disk
save order or in alphabetical order? If the second, how do you compute the
amount of data space to be assigned? (Because, then the whole directory
must be read in before doing pattermatch).

-Nath vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu