Amiga multi-tasking....Can't do anything else when copying files...

[kolla]

alexh wrote:
As has already been said it's totally normal. File operations are blocking in AmigaOS.

That's slightly inaccurate, they are not blocking in AmigaOS, only in (old) Workbench.

I remember first seeing non blocking file I/O (on the Amiga) for WB alternative "Scalos" and thinking, way cool!

And in DirectoryOpus5 you can even copy from multiple sources to multiple destinations simultaniously.

If you do not have a DMA capable SCSI card then it probably isn't worth looking into as the CPU will be performing the File I/O?

Ofcourse it's still worth it, you can set the CPU priority used for the copy operation and do other operations in Workbench as normal.

[kolla]

ncafferkey wrote:

Piru wrote:
BTW. Is 3.9 AsyncWB really stable? I remember talk of some nasty bugs in it.

Yes, I remember having problems with it, but I can't remember the details. One quirky bug that I made a note of at the time was that if you tried to copy a hard link to another volume, it attempted to create a hard link spanning the volumes. But I think there might have been worse bugs too.

Speaking of hard links - how do I know that a file is a hard link in the first place? Neither workbench nor c:List is able to tell them apart. Not softlinks either for that matter.

[kolla]

Piru wrote:
@kolla

how do I know that a file is a hard link in the first place?

AmigaOS API is a bit screwed here.

The only dos.library level solution is to ExNext/ExAll the parent directory.

For softlinks you can also ACTION_LOCATE_OBJECT the specific name. If you get an error and Result2 is ERROR_IS_SOFT_LINK then it is a softlink. If the packet succeeds you must free the lock with ACTION_FREE_LOCK.

As for the dir and list commands, they just don't support links.

Exactly, it seems very "half done".

The only thing I ever use linking for is a "makelink ram:Disk.info envarc:ram_disk.info soft" in s:user-startup, so that I can snapshot icon etc. as normal :-)