exists command - resolution

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dennis Malen" <dmalen at malen.com>
To: "Kenneth Brody" <kenbrody at bestweb.net>
Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 1:18 PM
Subject: Re: exists command - resolution


>I did execute the export twice. The header was overridden. When I executed
> two differently defined exports it worked.

Try the logic I posted.
And verify you are using a new enough version of fp that the -a flag has 
been fixed so it always works.

beyond that, you could easily brute force the issue by:
exporting to file.unique
followed by
cat file.unique >> file
rm file.unique


So if you have a shell script cron job or fp menu batch file:
* don't even bother testing for the existence of the file in the report
* just have the report always export, no @once or gosub or "-a" needed, just 
a simple table tha says export type out = (@pm) options... followed by 
out(x)=x
* use @pm in parens instead of a file name in the export command
* run the report with the following 5 lines of shell:

  >file.$$
  rreport ... -r file.$$
  cat file.$$ >> file
  rm file.$$

This doesn't care if the file already exists or not. It exports to a temp 
file and then appends the temp file to the real file. If the real file 
didn't exist it is simply created. And you don't need to do any testing in 
the report.

Doing the exists test in the process table and using the -a and the gosub 
exp and the @once etc... is good though because it works on any OS without 
changes whereas the above shell script needs some adjusting to work on 
windows.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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