The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

December 1995

Caught in the ‘Net

Contributed by Perry Andrus

perry.andrus@ast.com

Here is an interesting observation re WIN NT.

>>> John Holland <jholland@access.digex.net> 10/ 30/95 02:10pm >>>

I am trying to put a little backup to floppy routine in an app. I’ve got it working OK using PKZIP to do the work of compressing the files,etc. It won’t run though under NT—a DOS window comes up and says “Incorrect DOS version”. I’m building a string along the lines of “pkzip b:\archive c:\*.dbf c:\*.cdx c:\*.fptfl given the user’s drive letters etc and then doing “run &string”, which all works fine under DOS/VVindows. I think this is a PIF problem. Can anyone help?

Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 14:30:39 -0600

From: Craig Berntson <CRAlG@teltrust.com>

I think you’re looking for problems. We’ve been using ZIP routines from FPW under NT for quite sometime and find that FoxPro doesn’t handle the DOS box well when you shell out. Memory isn’t restored properly. Eventually, enough resources will be consumed to crash NT.

The problem is not with PKZIP, but with Fox shelling out to DOS. We have the same problem when we try to NET USE a volume from inside Fox. Our solution was to move to VFP and use the universal naming conventions (\\server\<volume>’) instead of mapping the drive. The PkZip problem also seems to have gone away.

Craig Berntson, Teltrust, Inc., Salt Lake City Fox User Group

From: Daniel Imbeault <rrsssca~qbc.clic. net>

1995

>Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 08:34:06 -0500

>From: “Harvey, Carol” <charvey~datalan.com>

>Subject: Corrupted tables in FPW 2.6

>Data into a master file. The client appended about 40 of these surveys into the master files, and exited the system. When she tried to go back in, she got the error “Memo file missing/invalid”. I had her run FPTFIX, and run the application again, then she got the error “Not a database”, or whatever that error message is. I went down to the client to try to recover the file, and it turns out that EVERY SINGLE FILE used in that system was corrupted.<

Here is a programm I got from the Montreal Foxpro User Group. It’s a function in plain FoxPro language that restores the header of the database in trouble. Works fine for me, and I hope a lot will benefit from it as the author wish...

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