🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: 20 October 1987, 09:11:00 EST
From: Jim McCabe                                JEMCCABE at MTUS5
      G31 East Coed Hall
      Michigan Technological University
      Houghton, MI
                                  49931
To:   INFO-ATARI16 at SCORE.STANFORD.EDU

[ Does Bitnet have line-eater problems too? ]

I've got a question for someone who knows a little about the
GEMDOS directory management.

I'm writing a program where it is necessary for the user to
take out the disk that the program was loaded from and insert
a data disk.  From this program, when I try to access a file
after swapping disks, it can find files just fine if they are
in the root directory, but subdirectories cause error -33 (at least
I think that's what error it was...  haven't looked at it in
a month or so...) which means that the pathname isn't found
or whatever.  Just to test this out, I wrote a small program
to do the exact same file I/O, but it works as it should with
the test program!  Somehow things aren't working in my real
program, and I am fairly certain that it isn't the fault of
the program.

If I could just force GEMDOS into loading the new directory tree...

With my test program, GEMDOS recognizes the fact that the disk
has been changed and loads the directory info off the new disk.
However, with my real program, it doesn't work.  (It doesn't
even access the disk!  I guess GEMDOS is just saying "I don't
have that subdirectory in my directory tree, and the disk
hasn't been changed since you accessed the root directory, nyah!")

I tried to set the "dirty" flags in the directory buffers (as
described breifly in the Abacus ST Internals book) and then
reaccess the disk, but nothing different happens.  How does
the GEM Item Selector box automatically get the new directory
when we tell it to?  How does the desktop do this when we hit
the <ESCAPE> key?  If I could only do this, I bet my problem
would go away...


                                       Confused,

                                              Jim