End of file encountered

[amerifax]

End of file encountered

I recently saw a message that mentioned encountered. I felt I should respond to this topic since I had a huge battle with dBase (Aston Tate) back around base IV in regards to the error message. It was a bug with dBase. It was a very big fiasco that ended out with a settlement. So if you're running an old copy and end up with this error it most likely is not anything you did.

Bob

 

[dbMark]

dBase 5 for DOS issues/quirks:

In an older Novell server, sometimes the table handles and the printer handles would get scrambled and printer output would be written onto a table's records and the table would become corrupted of course. Not sure what the issue was.

Noticed later, on Windows network, a program could jump out of the SCAN/ENDSCAN loop. Sometimes we would change the code to DO WHILE / SKIP / ENDDO to avoid that risk.

Tip: If you have programs default at startup to SET EXCLUSIVE OFF... If a table is going to be opened NOUPDATE, much faster access is possible by opening the table EXCLUSIVE NOUPDATE.

In a mixed dBase / Visual FoxPro environment, keep in mind (in simplest terms) that dBase 5 for DOS seems to do disk-based file/record locking (RLOCK, FLOCK, AGAIN) whereas Visual FoxPro does user-based locking. Quite possibly newer fully-Windows dBase versions work more similarly to VFP's behaviors.