dMZX Forums: Restore FREAD_LENGTH and FWRITE_LENGTH counters -> Archived Requests -> Tracker

Only found out about these counters recently since they aren't documented in counter.c with the rest of the counters that were removed with no compatibility layer. Essentially, these counters would return the length of the input file or directory and the (current) length of the output file, if open.

These counters were added in MZX 2.6, commented out in MZX 2.65 apparently due to them not working correctly, and then removed altogether in the port. They do not appear to have been documented in the changelog ever, and were easy to miss in the help file (where they were documented until 2.81) and probably went unused when they did exist due to bad color coding.

  // Don't think anyone was using these and they're crippled
  // anyway. - Exo

  /*    if(!str_cmp(name,"FREAD_LENGTH"))
    {
      if(input_file == NULL) return -1;
      return filelength(fileno(input_file));
    }

    if(!str_cmp(name,"FWRITE_LENGTH"))
    {
      if(output_file == NULL) return -1;
      return filelength(fileno(output_file));
    } */

A short discussion in the old request thread showing how ugly and hackish the current method of reading a file into a string currently is.

A fixed version of Exo's code in these posts:

set "blah.txt" "fread_open"
set "fread_pos" -1
set "file_size" "fread_pos"
set "fread_pos" 0
set "$string" "fread&file_size&"

This construct, which as a user who does this a lot I can say is really annoying, could be replaced with the much more legible and user-friendly

set "blah.txt" "fread_open"
set "$string" "fread&fread_length&"

The fread version can use either fstat or ftell/fseek, but the fwrite version needs ftell/fseek since the file will probably have changes that haven't been flushed.

Updating status to: Implemented
Updating severity to: 1 - Low
Issue fixed in: 2.92

Implemented in GIT da5cd407 in the master-2.92 branch.

Moving to: Archived Requests