From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2008-10-23T03:05:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Cygwin: Dir.glob ALWAYS accesses floppy??

Following up to myself, but anyway:

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Hugh Sasse wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Robert Klemme wrote:
> 
> > 2008/10/21 Hugh Sasse <hgs@dmu.ac.uk>:
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, 22 Oct 2008, Victor H. Goff III wrote:
> > >
> > > I'm avoiding that, I'm doing
> > >   Dir.["/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/hgs/**/*{.rb,.pl,.txt}"]
> > > which should not go near /dev or /cygdrive/a.
> > > If I break that up to not use ** but glob each directory in turn,
> > > the A: drive gets hammered with activity, one hit per glob.  This is
> > > on WinXP SP3, by the way.
> > 
> > I do not have this issue with my cygwin 1.5.25.
> > 
> > > I'm at a loss to account for this....
> > 
> > Did you check your environment for critical entries that point to the
> > floppy, like PATH, HOME, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, RUBYLIB?  You could also use
> 
> None of those reference /cygdrive/a or A:
> > "strace" to see what the interpreter does - maybe that gives you a
> 
> Hmm, strange.
> strace ruby -e 'puts Dir["/cygdrive/c/*{.txt,.bat}"]'
> doesn't touch the A drive.  I wonder.  I'll have to strace the 
> program I'm running, itself.  Probably something messes with the
> definition of glob.

I've not done this yet, partly because there is a Huge amount of output
from strace, and I'm not entirely sure what to search for, but partly
because I have investigated other things
> 
> It's ferret_helper, from Stuart Rackham, which I've modified in other
> places but nothing directly to do with Dir[].

ferret_helper does not redefine methods of Dir anywhere that I can see.
It does have its own methods that handle directories, implemented in C, 
but none of these seem to affect globbing.
> 
> > hint what causes the floppy access. The only other thing that comes to
> > mind is a virus scanner that for some reason during drive accesses
> > checks the floppy.
> 
> Does Symantec Endpoint Protection do that?  Why not for the short
> example?  It will take me a while to figure that out!

No closer to finding out about that.

The globbing on my Windows XP system took over a day.  I'm thinking of
rewriting that bit using File.find.  I've also found that I can't kill it
with <ctrl-C> while it is globbing.

> > 
> > Kind regards
> > 
> > robert
> > 
> > -- 
> > remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
> 
> I'm still lost for words about that....
> > 
> 
>         Hugh
>