Re: [MacPerl] unlinks cause disk corruption?

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com> writes:
>We then moved the script to my friend's machine and deleted the 3143 files.

>Shortly thereafter he rebooted his system and it wouldn't come up. He
>finally booted off of a CD-ROM and ran Norton Utilities and it listed a
>bunch of the deleted files as "lost" and restored them along with a pile of
>messed up B-Tree node errors, etc.

>Another friend suggested his system may have been marginal before the
>deletion process, but we have no way to check this.

I would tend to agree with that friend. Filesystem corruption often remains
hidden until significant changes are made.

As to the question whether MacPerl could have caused the corruption, I doubt
it. MacPerl accesses the file system *exclusively* via the appropriate level
Toolbox calls, so the only way to corrupt the file system would be by
accidental memory overwrites or crashes, and at least on my machine, MacPerl
does not seem to do that.

The program segment you sent looks correct to me.

Matthias

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
   "I'm set free to find a new illusion" -- Velvet Underground