Desperate plea: MenuMaestro

[Joe Chasan]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 10:51:58AM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Anyone got a manual they can a) email me, b) photocopy for me, c) sell me?
> 
> And, on a more pressing note: anyone know what the :phantom: command
> does?
> 
> I can't get gmm to handle phantom permissions correctly, and MenuEze
> pukes on the files cause they have phantom commands in them that I
> don't know what they do.

i have two menumaster manuals, one menueze, and one menumaestro.
the :phantom: command seems to be in menumaestro manual only.

if you send me your fax # i will send you the 'phantom' command pages (2).
as i still have menu_whatever installations, i'm not willing to part with
it on a permanent basis, but if you're really stuck you can give me your 
fedex acct #, i can lend you for say 2 weeks, you can copy/scan/whatever
the near 200 pages, then send back.

the phantom command, however, is somewhat limited in its usefulness and
i don't remember using it too often.

basically, what happened is this - menumaster (and its children) had always
had bugs when 2+ people selected same menu option at same time if those
option used the 'selector' or 'replace' commands - commonly, you'd see
the file get overwritten with a zero length file, forcing you to scramble
for some backup version.

at some point, not sure which version, in order to fix this they decided to 
not write to the original file anymore but to a uniquely named copy of it,
and the subsequent report/screen line would internally "know" to use this
file - the name was hidden and it was just nicknamed the "phantom" file
in the docs - the report or screen line never had to know the actual name
of the phantom file (sel.aging copy might be sel.01242aab)

the :phantom: command gives you access to this filename.

i think you needed the $gmmmulti system variable to be set to "on" for
this to work, and the phantom command returns the last part of the filename.

as was intimated earlier, all relates to $tmpdir (i think defaulted to /tmp
on sco), where each users list of open "phantom" files were stored under
sels$upid - and i think $upid is not necessarily PID, but something assigned
by menumaestro.  of course mm needed full perms on a lot of places, perhaps
thats still your issue on either $tmpdir or the filepro file itself
(something that gets "fixed" with fp's setperm thing)

syntax
:phantom:filepath:[env_var]:[erase]

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-Joe Chasan-                      Magnatech Business Systems, Inc.
joe at magnatechonline.com           Hicksville, NY - USA
http://www.MagnatechOnline.com    Tel.(516) 931-4444/Fax.(516) 931-1264