Year 2000 File Dates and the R:BASE DIR Command

At RBTI we have become aware that all versions of R:BASE prior to R:BASE 2000 (ver 6.5) will not correctly display the date for files on disk with modification dates on January 1, 2000 or later when using the R:BASE DIR command. There is no internal date problem in R:BASE, but a display problem that affects only the listing of files that results from the DIR command.

Please be assured that this is only a cosmetic problem and is related to the R:BASE behavior in reports where information that cannot fit into a field is displayed with *'s.

For example:

R>dir *.*

    Volume in drive C has no label.
    Directory of C:\RBTI\RBWIN\
    ABC      TXT       1475   1-07-*0  11:05a
    CONCOMP  RB1      11200  11-20-96  11:35a
    CONCOMP  RB2     204800  11-20-96  11:35a
    CONCOMP  RB3      40960  11-20-96  11:35a
    CONCOMP  RB4     143360  11-20-96  11:35a
    5 File(s) 642383872 bytes free
    R>

Notice that the ABC.TXT file was created on January 7th and displays *0 for the year.

Again, please be assured that this does not affect R:BASE functionality in anyway. Unless you are manually retreiving a Directory and attempting to parse it inside of your program you should not be affected by this complication at all.

In that case there is a work around this problem, you can get a DOS DIR command to work fine:

In NT:

ZIP cmd.exe /c DIR

In Win 9x or DOS:

ZIP command.com /c DIR

In either:

SET VAR vComSpec = (ENVVAL('COMSPEC'))
ZIP &vComSpec /c DIR

If you want the screen display to stop after a screenful, or to sort the list, or make other changes to the display, you can add DOS DIR command line switches to the right of the DIR command and file specification.

For example, in most versions of DOS, the /o switch sorts the directory, and the -d variation puts it in descending order by date. The /p switch pauses when the screen is full:

SET VAR vComSpec = (ENVVAL('COMSPEC'))
ZIP &vcomSpec /c DIR *.* /o-d /p

If you want the output to go to a file, don't count on the R:BASE OUTPUT command, but use the DOS redirection operator (>)

SET VAR vComSpec = (ENVVAL('COMSPEC'))
SET VAR vFileName = (FILENAME(0))
ZIP &vComSpec /c DIR > &vFileName

Positions of items left to right will be different from the R:BASE DIR command, and will vary from one operating system or version to another, so you will have to rewrite any LOAD command, too, that loads the results of the DIR command into a table.

We hope this clarifies the matter. Should you have any questions feel free to contact us.

If you would like to upgrade your existing version of R:BASE to the latest version, please feel free to contact our dedicated sales team.