Logging Device Tokens

Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com
Thu Aug 9 20:35:44 EDT 2012


It was a fixed length file format. It had a header that ended in an eof, followed by lines that were in length the sum total  of all the columns +1. The +1 was the deleted flag at the beginning of the record. There were no variable length columns. Everything was padded with spaces. Even numerical columns were stored as text. The header defined what the format of the column was. Very simple. 

If you knew what the structure of the database was (or had a blank copy of the structure lying around) you could recover the data pretty easily by stripping the header off, then reading each line into a text processor that deleted the first character and then saved it out to another file. That file could then be imported as a fixed length file format and voila! You had a recovered table! 

There were utilities that were able to read the header to get the structure, but ignore other info that was bad (which was usually what went wrong) and recover the table for you. 

Bob


On Aug 9, 2012, at 2:15 PM, Mike Kerner wrote:

> I may have completely forgotten that time (on purpose, even), but as I
> recall, DBASE at least at one time, was a very simple tab-delimited file
> structure.





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