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Received: by UOTTAWA (Mailer X1.23b) id 9249; Fri, 08 May 87 12:14:04 EDT
Date:         Fri, 08 May 87 12:09:20 EDT
From:         John Turnbull <051332@UOTTAWA>
Subject:      Bug report: 'The Russian Doll'  sp. nova (?)
To:           INFO-ATARI16@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU


I don't know if this is a new species of bug, or one of the known ones
in a new morph ...

The System:
Monochrome (SM124) 1040STF and a NECP6 printer

The disks:
SSDD Maxels formatted to DSDD with David Small & Dan Moore's TWISTER
with the net mods (82 tracks)

The AUTO folder:
John Franco's ETERNAL2.PRG dated 1/30/87
anon. VEROFF.PRG (this is the VEROFF half of VEROFFON.UUE from ATARINET)
M.R. Singer's TIMEDATE.PRG V1.0 10/25/85

What I did:
I was making up the masters for the DISK(s)-OF-THE-MONTH for the
OTTAWA ST users group (NCAUG), uudecoding and de-arching goodies from
ATARINET, and PROG-A16, and filing the ARCs and the .PRGs on separate
disks from the ramdisk.  The ARCs went on strait, but the .PRGs, .DOCs,
et als were put in folders.  (I must have created several dozen folders
and copied them hither and yon during the session.)  I 'discovered' that
there was no need (or did not seem to be) to change the directory in the
A window to copy from the RAM disk.  I would make a copy of a .UUE file
to the RAM disk, UUDECODE it, (UUDECODE.TTP from CANADA01), de-ARC it,
and while ARC was still stuck in ... hit any key ... remove the .UUE
disk, and put in the .ARC disk, then hit any key.  BINGO, there is the
..ARC directory.  Point to the .ARC, drag and copy into A.  THEN make a
.ARC directory.  Point to the .ARC, drag and copy into A.  THEN make a
new folder in D, copy the .PRGs, .DOCs, and things to the folder, and
pull out the .ARC disk, and put in the folder disk (NOTE:  I have not
left the D directory, and the quiet A directory still reads the .ARC
directory).  Then point to the new folder, click, drag, whizz-whizz-
blink, and the A directory reads the contents of the FOLDER disk with
the new folder!  (look, I've saved several point-ESC cycles.  At 3 in
the morning, that seemed important!)

What it did:
Everything looked OK.  If I put the FOLDER disk into the drive and hit
ESC I got the FOLDER disk directory, but if I pointed to a folder and
double-clicked to open it ...  whizz-whizz-blink  ... I got the same
directory.  All the folders 'THOUGHT' they had all the other folders
inside them!  (hence the name Russian Doll).   If I did a show info on
a folder, I got No. of Fol:   0;  No of ITEMS:  0; and Bytes used:  0.
Now if I closed the window and reopened it all was well.  Show info did
the normal thing and I could read and copy files.

Questions:
1) is this new?   (can I name it)
2) is it the 40 folder thing?   ... and what are the symptoms
3) is it the underscore thing?    (did I neglect to mention that I use
   _underscores_a_lot in filenames, and folders?  I've never been burned
   before.)
4) is there some incompatibility in the programs that I used?
5) is there a TROGEN-HORSE on ATARINET or PROG-A16?   (this beast seems
   to be infectious, the copies all have it). I could not resist testing
   some of the new thing just to see what they did.
6) is the procedure that I described above expressly prohibited on pg1
   of the ST owner's manual?

Any help or explanations would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance.  /JT

John Turnbull,            NETNORTH: 051332@UOTTAWA
30 Somerset Ave,          BITNET: 051332@UOTTAWA
Dept. of Biology,         ARPANET: 051332%UOTTAWA.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Univ. of Ottawa,          uucp:   ...!psuvax1!051332%uotawa.BITNET
Ottawa,  Ontario,         JANET:  051332%uottawa@rl.earn
CANADA,  K1N 6N5.         ICBM:  45 25' 33'' N  75 39' 05'' W