🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug25.150814.24089@news.columbia.edu> (comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.misc), ia4@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Imran Anwar) writes:
| Hi.  I have had a Stuffit script running fine for several months.  It
| looks in a folder, creates a new .sit file and stuffs all files which
| have names begining with 1,   eg 1000, 1001, etc. and deleting files it
| stuffs
| 
| Today it has gone bonkers!
| 
| It is stuffing only every alternate file, eg
| 
| 1000,1002,1004....or 1001,1003,1005...depending on whether the top file
| is even or odd numbered!
| 
| Any ideas what is happening?

This is a problem I reported to Aladdin regarding StuffIt 2.0 scripts. I'm
assuming you're running StuffIt 2.0 and not the latest version, 3.0. I wasn't
able to find a work around then, except to manually delete (in the Finder)
after running the StuffIt script.

As to what is happening. It's works like this. StuffIt queries the directory
for how many files it has, and the directory answers, say 10. Next StuffIt
uses a file system call that allows it to access the files in the directory
by an index, i.e. file #0, file #1, etc. StuffIt then stuffs the first file,
(file #0) and then deletes it. StuffIt then stuffs the second file (file
#1) and the deletes it. And so on.

However, the instance you delete a file, the directory then renumbers the
files! Thus if you delete file #0, then file #1 now becomes file #0.
StuffIt 2.0 does not compensate for this and deletes file #1, which was
formerly file #2. The end result is that files #1, #3, #5, etc. are never
deleted. (You noted that sometimes only even numbered files are deleted,
I believe this is because the file system orders the files a bit differently
than Finder does in it's displays.)

The solution for this given example, as strange as it may seem, is to always
delete file #0 until you have deleted it 10 times.

--Dave

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