TextEditor Trouble?

[William Roberts;]

In <27782425.5317 at orion.oac.uci.edu> rprohask at orion.oac.uci.edu (Robert 
Prohaska) writes:

>TextEditor seems to have a curious interaction  with Moire, and I'm
>wondering if the net can shed any light on the problem.

>The current Moire screensaver seemed to work properly in all but the
>login system folder until I tried to toggle between TextEditor and 
>CommandShell by clicking on the MultiFinder icon at the right edge
>of the menu bar.  Apparently the icon was inside the "sleep now" box
>for Moire, so both Moire and something else, I guess the Finder, woke
>up at the same time. The screen went black, then the TextEditor window
>appeared against a black background when I clicked again on the icon,
>then the TextEditor window dissapeared and I was left in CommandShell.

>The TextEditor session apparently died leaving a pair of files named
> %TextEditor.Scratch and TextEditor.Scratch but neither file is visible
>in the Finder window of the directory.

We've seen something similar, and our suspicion is that it is an interaction 
between Moire and "hybrid programs", i.e. COFF binaries that use the -lmac 
library to get access to the Toolbox. But, since Moire is not an Apple 
supported product and we don't know how it works anyway, it doesn't seem worth 
the considerable effort of producing a repeatable demonstration of the problem.

>How does it happen that the Finder and Commandshell fail to agree on
>the contents of a directory?

Finder only checks periodically, whereas commands like "ls" read the directory 
information on demand.
--

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  071-975 5250 (Fax: 081-980 6533)