Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!lakesys!macak From: macak@lakesys.UUCP (James Macak) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: undeletable folder--help? Keywords: DeskZap... Message-ID: <1141@lakesys.UUCP> Date: 27 Sep 89 01:14:27 GMT References: <3762@blake.acs.washington.edu> <17630@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1128@lakesys.UUCP> <1989Sep26.222410.15735@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> Reply-To: macak@lakesys.UUCP (James Macak) Distribution: usa Organization: Lake Systems - Milwaukee, Wisconsin Lines: 55 In article <1989Sep26.222410.15735@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> gray@med.pitt.edu (Gray Watson) writes: >>The easy way out of this problem is to take a tool like FEdit or MacSnoop and >>set the count in the directory to zero. If you're not familiar with the >>directory structure, play around with a floppy first by making a folder or >>two, putting a known number of files in each one, and then searching the disk >>for these values. >Ugh!! >>0000 0100 XXXX where XXXX contains the number of files in the folder in Hex. >>Change XXXX to 0000. Make sure you do this to all occurances of >>FolderFromHell. >I think my brain just overloaded!!! :^0 Yes, mine did too, but after reading the directions a few times, practicing on a "test" folder, and then following the directions in light of my practice session, I _was_ able to delete such an "undeleteable" folder. >One of the reasons for keeping the great, old DeskZap DA around is for solving >this very problem. >DeskZap is the only utility I have ever seen with the Close-Open-File command. >Open the folder-from-hell with this command should list the offending files >which you can select and close. This should allow you to throw away the folder >NORMALLY. >If is doesn't then uuuh..... follow what those guys said... :-) >gray DeskZap may be a useful utility (haven't used it for ages myself) but the use of it as outlined above has no bearing on the problem as outlined above that! (I hope you can follow that!) The problem is that the Finder _thinks_ there are files in that undeleteable folder though there are in fact none there. As noted in the original message, Finder looks for "0" for the number of files in a folder to see if it is an empty folder. The problem arises when that number comes up as non-zero (including a negative number) and does not match the real number of files in the folder (which is usually zero since the user has tried to delete all the files already). Then you can't delete the folder (because it has non-zero files) and you can't delete the files (because they are already gone)! This, at least, is my understanding of the situation, which is more complex than the problem of a "busy" file in a folder. Jim -- macak@lakesys.lakesys.com (James Macak) << All my own opinions. >>