Bruker Aspect Software Bug

Mark Rosen (rosen@nmr.chem.umn.edu)
Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:37:25 -0600 (CST)

Here's one for the buglist....

Maybe some of you who use Aspect computers more that I do are already
familiar with this: We have a Bruker AC-200 and a Bruker AC-300 with
Aspect 3000 computers running ADAKOS 890201.0. We recently hired a new
TA whose job (among other things) is to periodically delete old data
files. Since she has been doing this we have on a couple occasions lost
a number of .AU and .001 files needed to run the system. When talking to
her, it appeared that she was doing things correctly and could not
possibly be deleting *.AU or **.AU or something like that. Today we
finally figured it out. She typed:

DELOC\CO\OC16*.*

(For those of you not familiar with the Bruker way of backspacing, this
is equivalent to typing DELOC16*.*)

Interestingly enough, this typing error does not generate an error message
or do the intended command: DEL OC16*.*. Instead what it does is

DEL *.*

For those of you not familiar with Aspect computers, this is not as
catastrophic as typing rm *.* on a UNIX system, since a "*" on an Aspect
matches 4 or fewer characters, but it still wipes out a number of files
needed to run the system (since all files are in a single directory on
these beasts).

If you are as amazed by this as I am, try it sometime with DIR instead of DEL.

-- 
Mark Rosen                              E-Mail:  rosen@nmr.chem.umn.edu
NMR Facility                            Phone:   (612) 625-8374
Department of Chemistry                 FAX:     (612) 626-7541
University of Minnesota
207 Pleasant St. S.E.
Minneapolis, MN  55455