Hi, Amiga guys and Amiga gals. I like to post about strange and obscure things. Today I downloaded an lha file from aminet that contained a main folder and a number of subfolders and files. I used my PC running Windows 10 to download the file and WinZip to extract the files. Evidently it can do that. I'm not sure if that is relevant. Then I attempted to copy the root folder to my Amiga X5000 using a USB thumb drive. It seemed to copy okay. When I tried to open the folder, all I saw was a number of .info files. That was with the window set to "show all". I was expecting to find an executable file that I could double-click on. The files did show up in file managers like filer. I fiddled around with it for a while and imagined all kinds of dire problems that could be causing it, ranging up to a complete computer failure. After a while I noticed almost by accident that the protect bits were messed up. Some of them said "wed". They should say "rwed". In other words some of the files were not readable. I don't know how some of the read bits of some of the files were cleared. Maybe WinZip did it. Maybe the poster of the lha file did it by accident. You wouldn't do that on purpose. Anyway, if files refuse to show up in Workbench, there is no need to do something drastic. Just check the protect bits. This probably applies to all versions of AmigaDOS.

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X5000 / microA1(OS4.1 FE U2) / CodeBench / Imagine / Blender
Lightwave 2019 / Microsoft Visual C++

@thinkchip

I do believe that has been brought up quite a long time ago and I think you are correct that it's because you unzipped the files using Winzip, rather than un-lha-ing them, that's messed the protect bits up.

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Fred Booth
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A500, A600, A1200 c/w Mediator and 030
AmigaOne and OS4.1
Mac LCII, G4 Powermac running OSX + Amigakit and MorphOS 3.0
Dell Mini 10 Netbook running IcAros and AmigaForever+Amikit+AmigaSys
2006 Macb

@thinkchip

windows does not have "e" and "s" protection bits, insted windows depends on extentions like .com or .exe or .bat, zip files a windows thing, don't use it on Amiga programs. use lha

You can make a ISO 9660 rockridge disc image, and compress the image file.

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http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

You can also just fix the protection flags, it isn’t exactly voodoo.

List path:to/files all lformat “protect *”%p%n*” rwed” | execute

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

Quote:

thinkchip wrote: Hi, Amiga guys and Amiga gals. I like to post about strange and obscure things.

IF SO,
can you please finally tell us all what this is?




/mega!

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I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
--
CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL,

Looks like some new Fred Flintstone car.

Chris

@QuikSanz

No friend QuikSanz,

our comrade and - lest we forget - creator of BLACKFANG,
had different versions of the stone-tank-granny through the years.

It has to be something he personay renders,
hopefully not the unholy byproduct of a combination of unspeakable fetishes.




/m!

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I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
--
CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Friend Mega,
what a terrible machinery and I wonder what the above text stands for.

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SAM440EP-FLEX @ 733 Mhz, AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1

@thinkchip

It's not obscure, it should be a known fact that you should use filesystems that are compatible with the OS if you're handling anything else than data/archive files. A rule of thumb is to never unarchive anything on alien systems.

Amiga's file attributes are only preserved on Amiga compatible file systems like OFS, FFS, PFS, SFS, and couple others. We've seen countless threads on forums where people have got troubles when unarchiving Amiga programs on alien systems and copying them over with an alien filesystem. It's just pure luck if they happen to work in that way, and even then they might not work completely as designed.

The worst thing you could do is to backup your Amiga's system files just by copying them over to a mass storage device that contains an alien filesystem like FAT, NTFS, Ext, etc. You'd lose protection bits like S and P which are commonly used in AmigaOS and you'd also lose file comments. If you restore a backup like this, the system just isn't how it's supposed to be anymore. And the same applies to programs distributed by 3rd party developers, you might not know on what file attributes they rely on their software.

There are also differences on filename characters supported by filesystems. On Amiga you might have characters on filenames that aren't supported on other filesystems. Many demoscene productions have some custom characters that fail on alien filesystems, and there's the infamous " " file in MUI 3.8 archive, for example.

So, always unpack software archives on Amiga itself. You can transfer them via an alien filesystem if you haven't unarchived them yet.

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- The wiki based MorphOS Library - Your starting point for MorphOS
- Software made by jPV^RNO

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

The quality of the render definitely improved compared to the previous iteration:

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This is just like television, only you can see much further.

Here’s an obscure feature… an assign can point to a file rather than a path. For example, you can “assign NIL: dismount” and follow up with a “assign NIL: RAM:myfile” and have a look at what goes there.

Last edited by kolla on 04-Nov-2022 at 09:17 PM.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@BSzili

Friend BSZili, thanks,
I was looking for that and couldn't find it!

I am not sure the new one is an improvement.
This one has more character.

ANYWAY, WILL THINKCHIP PLEASE UPDATE US ON BLACKFANG?


/MEGA!!!!!

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I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
--
CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@thinkchip

I'm not sure how this is is an obscure AmigaDOS feature or even a feature. You've done some unpacking on Windows with WinZip and then found the files broke with AmigaOS. Wouldn't that make it a feature of WinZip to break the files?

It's still common to do this. Though I don't know why. It must be faster to unpack and copy the raw files to a USB stick separately than to copy one smaller file to USB and extract on the X5000 or any OS4 machine.

On Linux the common LhA tools break on OS4 archives so that problem can't happen because they can't be extracted from Linux. It's the first time I recall the R bit missing as usually they end up as RWED by default. So they usually work by default. But the main problem is scripts. Since the S bit will be destroyed in the process.