Re: A problem

On Sun 24 Mar, Richard Torrens (RiscOS) wrote:
> 
> In article <[email protected]>,
> James Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 
> > Then all your program needs to do is poll for the existence
> > of that marker file and when it is gone you will know
> > that Blackhole has finished.
> 
> I had not thought of that - but Blackhole single tasks during deletions.

Then where's the problem? If it single tasks, any program running
in a taskwindow on the same machine will not get control back
until Blackhole stops single tasking. At this point you know that
it has finished and is ready.

> Whether a networked command can check the existemce of a file,
> I don't know. Trials I have made along these lines throw up an
> error window 'Please insert disc etc.'

It seems I've misunderstood you. I thought the backup was being
controlled by a Perl program running on the machine with
Slackhole (whoops typo) Blackhole on it and that files were being
copied from that machine onto another on the network.

Correct me if I've got this wrong but if you are remotely
initiating a reboot on this machine and expecting Blackhole to
perform its expiry as part of its startup before it begins to
multitask, then all you need is a Filer_Run command in
Blackhole's !Run file to trigger off some other program once
Blackhole has finished. That other program might be as simple as
an obey file that creates an empty marker file on the remote
machine, or as complex as a full Perl program to carry on with
the backup process.

It occurs to me that you wouldn't need to perform a reboot either
if you could just send Blackhole a faked Wimp message with a
menu clicked reason code. (!Keystroke will do this kind of thing
for you if you don't wish to write a little program yourself.)

-- 
James Taylor <[email protected]>
Based in Southam, Cheltenham, UK.
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