Re: XYWRITE digest 2422

[Myron Gochnauer goch@xxxxxxxx]

I'm using a Mac most of the time now, so XyWrite is run under
VirtualPC + Win2K.
Except for the problem you're having, I hope that has been working
ok for you.
...well, the major on-going annoyance is the inability to negotiate
my way through long-file-named directories. XyWrite of any flavour
along with NB of any version simply cannot access many directories on
my Mac.
This occurred even with files that I had never opened on a Mac,
but had been copied and backed up on the Mac. The problem seems
to be a Mac OS X issue, although I haven't seen anyone else
mention it.
Do you know any more about what this Mac OS X issue is? AFAIK, i
haven't had any problems with files back and forth between OS X and
VPC.
No, I have no idea what the problem is. It doesn't seem to have
anything to do with VPC. I don't even know when the problem(s)
happened, except that the only files affected were handled by Mac,
usually by copying to or from an external hard disk.
Is there a readily available DOS or Unix utility that will strip
the eof marker?

Do you mean the DOS EOF marker?

Yes.
I could, of course, open and resave every XyWrite document using
TextEdit (Mac standard quickie editor), but I'd like something I
could use in a batch file (or unix equivalent).
This might cause another problem, if you plan to save the file in
Textedit then open that in Xywrite. From what i understand, and
there are more knowledgeable people here on this list so please
correct me if i am wrong, but the OS X file system uses a different
type of line ending than DOS. (The OS X system being Unix based is
also different than the original Mac OS 9 and earlier system.) To
me, saving a file in the default textedit settings would put Unix
line ending in your text file. This may or may not cause a problem
when you open the file in Xywrite. I use either BBedit lite to
change the files' line ending to be DOS compatible. I also use a
unix utility i compiled for OS X, to convert the line ending for a
bunch of files at once, called FLIP.
This isn't exactly what you were asking for, but i know that this
could be an issue.
Is there a readily available DOS or Unix utility that will strip the
eof marker?
ZAP26 will strip it from the currently-saved version of
the current
file (not what's in your window necessarily, but what you last saved).

Good. I had forgotten about that.
Is there a readily available DOS or Unix utility that will strip
the eof marker?
You can always do it with the good ol' DOS program: DEBUG. DEBUG
comes with all DOS/Windows systems. This is a bottom-level, nitty-
gritty utility that everyone should know about. Here's how to do
it. Don't be put off by the length of my discussion: the
explanation is long but the steps are short. Hmmm, let me begin by
just listing the 6 essential steps, on a hypothetical file
("myfile") that turns out to have a 1A at memory locatin 41B hex.
Then I'll explain in extensa.

1. DEBUG myfile
2. S CS:100 900 1A
3. E 41B
4. 00
5. W
6. Q
Interesting. I haven't used Debug since I was running XyWrite III on
a Hyperion computer. That computer had an "improved" character table,
so it was incompatible with regular XyWrite. Someone figured out how
to tweak editor.exe to work with the Hyperion, but that meant that
every time there was a new version or bug fix, I had to search
through the code to find the places to correct.
Hmmm. Maybe I should dig out that book about programming in
assembler again. Now that was *real* programming, eh?

Thanks.
Myron