Riffing on Raymond - FindFirst/FindNext

As I mentioned, I've been Riffing on Raymond a lot - Yesterdays post from Raymond got me to thinking about FindFirst and FindNext in MS-DOS.

As Raymond pointed out:

That's because the MS-DOS file enumeration functions maintained all their state in the find structure. The FAT file system was simple enough that the necessary search state fit in the reserved bytes and no external locking was necessary to accomplish the enumeration. (If you did something strange like delete a directory while there was an active enumeration on it, then the enumeration would start returning garbage. It was considered the program's responsibility not to do that. Life is a lot easier when you are a single-tasking system.)

The interesting thing about the fact that MS-DOS kept its state in a the reserved bytes of the find structure was that there were a bunch of apps that figured this out.  And then they realized that they could make suspend and resume their searches by simply saving away the 21 reserved bytes at the start of the structure and spitting them into a constant find first structure.

So a program would do a depth first traversal of the tree, and at each level of the tree, instead of saving the entire 43 byte FindFirst structure, they could save 22 bytes per level of the hierarchy by just saving the first 21 bytes of the structure.  In fact, some of them were even more clever, they realized that they could save just the part of the reserved structure that they thought were important (something like 8 bytes/level).

And that's just what they did...

Needless to say, that caused kittens when the structures used for search had to change - these apps looked into the internal data structures and assumed they knew what they did...