xfer problems sco-sun

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 10:19:24AM -0800, Bill Campbell wrote:
> >Would that it were that simple: it's the twenty byte header at the
> >beginning *of each record* that needs bytes swapped.
> 
> Complicated by the fact that the FP key and data records are fixed length
> with no \n linefeed delimiter so one has to read fixed length.  I did this
> with a C program years before learning perl where it would probably be only
> a bit more than a one-liner.

Complicated further by the fact that not only does each *record* have
a header, *the file does, too*.

> More fun though was a FP customer running on a Radio Shack Model 16 where
> disk problems created shifts in the filepro files where the key and data
> files would get out of sequence (e.g. all fields past a certain record
> would be shifted one byte to the left or some such, changing repeatedly
> through the files).  Naturally the key and data files didn't shift at the
> same places (and there weren't any backups of course :-).

Eek!

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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        "They had engineers in my day, too."  -- Perry Vance Nelson