Re: XY SIEZURES

[PAUL DE GROOT]

We've had this problem at our newspaper too. I understand it's coded into
XyWrite. When you get an out-of-memory message when you call up a directory, it
probably means that the directory listing exceeds 64K. We use long directories
(dirl) for a lot of stuff and find that we can only show about 225 files from a
directory. In addition, I understand that once a directory exceeds 630 files,
XyWrite won't access any files from it. You can check this by calling up the
window menu after you get an out-of-memory message when calling a directory.
You should see from that that the window takes 64K. I'm told there's no fix in
it in 3.55. We work around the problem in several ways. We keep directories
below 630 files by sorting files into various directories. We also have some
features in our help file which let users modify the number of lines shown by
the dirl command. This lets you squeeze more in to the 64K buffer, if you show
fewer lines. You can also reverse the order of the directory, if you sort
entries by time, as we do. By showing newest files first, and then shifting the
sort order to oldest first, you can come at the directory from both ends. The
other way is to ask for only some of the files in the directory. Shell to dos
and do a DIR to get a look at the file names. go back to xywrite and do DIR
A*.* which will show you a subset of the files, namely those beginning with the
letter A, (or whatever you want). if this produces something which doesn't
exceed the 64K or 630-file boundaries, you can keep working.