Strange NUL value occurrence in some fields

[James Flanagan]

FreeBSD 12.2
Filepro 5.7.00.09D4

I have found a few occurrences of what appeared to be data corruption in a few fields in my database.  

In the fields where this had occurred, the screen with those field values would appear to show an “upper left hand corner line” where there should have otherwise been an ascii letter or number, as the edit type for the field is (6,allup).  

http://flantec.com/images/filepro1.png

I have examined the keyfile in a hex editor, and the 6 characters for this field, represented on the far right as “……”, have ascii values as “00” for each character, the NUL character.  As you see both above and below the 00’s, every other “blank” character in each field is represented by “20”, the standard space character.  No matter if you blank out a field manually, or send a lookup(8)=“ “ type of command, the blank field will always be made of “20” ascii characters.  

http://flantec.com/images/filepro2.png

In addition, this only affects this field in question, without affecting the fields either prior or after, which I would assume rules out any intermittent failing drive.  Not to mention, this corruption to the field appears to happen on the original save of the record, and not as the result of any subsequent edit to the record.

So, my question is does anyone have any idea what could possibly be happening here, resulting in an ascii “00” character, and even more importantly, how to possibly prevent it?  Thank you very much in advance...




James Flanagan
Flantec.com <http://flantec.com/>

email:	James at Flantec.com <mailto:James at Flantec.com>
mobile:	760-458-8498
home: 	219-221-6219
text:		7604588498 at txt.att.net <mailto:7604588498 at txt.att.net>

Skype:	Flantec
ichat:	James at Flantec.com <mailto:James at Flantec.com>	

home:	1901 Cidermill Road
		Michigan City, IN 46360



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