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3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 323d7a0330 A listing says what is left of the disk, and what will fit
dir said what was there and nothing about what was left. SplitDisk has
printed the free figure since it was written, so the machine's own
listing was the poorer of the two implementations at describing the same
disk.

  43 files, 3 directories
  46 of 64 entries, 1893 blocks free

Entries first, because they are the ceiling nobody notices until they hit
it: a disk of small files runs out of directory slots long before it runs
out of blocks.

COUNTED RATHER THAN ASKED. The superblock keeps a free count and this
file calls it "a note rather than the truth" in three places. sbfsSpace
reads the whole directory table instead, which costs a read per directory
block and is the answer rather than a guess. SplitDisk goes on reading
the note and saying when it is stale, which is the right place for that
check - the host tool is what you audit a disk with.

---- And it is a fact about the disk, not about where you are ----

The first version added the blocks up as the LISTING walked past them,
which cost no extra read and was wrong: that walk stops only on entries
in the working directory, so the same disk came out as 1,996 blocks free
from the root and 2,025 from /Apps. Comparing against SplitDisk is what
said so, which is what having two implementations is for.

---- The longest run, which is what decides whether a file fits ----

  4 of 16 entries, 37 blocks free
  the longest run is 25

Files are laid down contiguously, so the free total does not say whether
a file will fit. Both implementations learn it, from one specification.

Said only when it differs from the free total. Deleting is what fragments
a contiguous store, and a disk that has only been appended to has one gap
at the end - so on a healthy disk this is silent, and a line that appears
only when something is wrong is a line somebody reads.

There is no sort on this machine and the entries are in no order, so a
candidate walks the disk: each pass finds the used extent nearest at or
after it, and anything the candidate stands inside pushes it to the far
end and starts the pass again. The same trick allocating uses. So it
costs a pass per gap rather than per file - nearly nothing on a disk with
one gap, more the more fragmented the disk is, which is the right way
round.

holes.img is six files with the second and fourth deleted, because no
other disk here can show any of this: none of them has ever had anything
deleted from it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-06 18:19:04 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 736037462e The shell edits the line it is given
Three different things used to do this job, and which one you got depended on
where the machine was running. On a terminal the host held the line and did the
echoing and the backspacing; behind a window the console's own gatherer did it;
from a file nothing did it at all. One job, three implementations, none of them
in the system - which is why there was no way to move about in a line and
nowhere for a history to live.

So editLine does it. Key mode while a line is being read and line mode straight
after, so nothing else in the system and no program calling osReadLine notices
anything changed. Left and Right, Home and End, Backspace for the character
before the cursor and Delete for the one under it, and anything typed goes in
where the cursor is with the rest of the line moving along.

Ctrl-D means the end of input again, on an empty line, because that was a thing
the terminal did while it was holding the line and it is not holding it now.
Same trade as the echoing.

MOST KEYSTROKES DRAW NOTHING BUT THEMSELVES. A character typed at the end of a
line needs no cursor moved: printing it is the whole change, and a backspace
there is three ordinary bytes. That matters beyond speed - moving the cursor by
hand is what a terminal is TOLD about, in an escape sequence, so redrawing on
every keypress would fill every recorded transcript in this suite with them.
The line is only reprinted when something happened in the middle of it.

Where the line STARTS is worked out backwards from where printing ended, rather
than trusted from what was remembered. That is what makes it survive the screen
scrolling: a line printed on the bottom row moves everything up by one, and a
remembered row would be one too low from then on.

The command line holds 127 characters, up from 63. The limit started to be felt
the moment a line could be moved about in.

58 recordings changed, and every one of them by the echo. THE PROOF IS NOT A
HEURISTIC: a CosmOS built with the echo silenced reproduces 187 of the 188
recordings byte for byte. The one exception is cosmosTyped, the backspace test,
where the rub-out marks now come from the shell instead of from the console's
gatherer - same marks, different author.

cosmosEditKeys is the new test, and every line in it is typed wrong and then
corrected with a different key. Its last line is eighty six characters at a
prompt in column two on an eighty column screen, so the line runs onto the row
below and the shell has to find the start of something it can no longer see;
breaking either half of that arithmetic fails it.

Also: agree.sh looked for "> the same", anchored to a prompt that no longer
precedes what a command prints.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-31 23:01:55 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 da91a36d92 D4: the machine makes directories too
mkdir and rmdir are the machine's own now, and a file goes where its path says
rather than always in the root. A disk can be organised without the host tool
touching it.

Everything below the surface works in terms of a directory and a name rather
than a path. sbfsWalkParent splits the last name off, walks the rest, and hands
back the two - and the separator stays on the end of the head, which is what
makes one rule cover every kind of path: "/x" leaves "/", which is the root;
"x" leaves nothing, which is where the machine already is; and "A/x" leaves
"A/", which is neither and needs no special case to say so.

Saving works in those two as well, and had to. The careful order a save uses -
make a temporary, write it, delete the original, rename the temporary - only
works if the temporary is made in the SAME directory as the file, because the
rename at the end changes a name and does not move anything. Renaming to a path
naming a different directory is refused for that reason, rather than quietly
being a lie the disk goes along with.

Three things this cost, all found by running it:

mkdir Apps/Deep made /Apps/Apps. The leaf was worked out into SbfsWanted and
then the head was walked - and walking goes through sbfsPathNext, which puts
every name it meets into SbfsWanted on the way past. The head's last name
landed exactly where the leaf was. It has somewhere of its own now.

rmdir took a directory with something still in it, which is the one failure the
whole design is arranged to prevent. Looking for children clobbered DP2 and
rebuilt it from the buffer and the entry count with the subtraction the wrong
way round, so the pointer walked off the end of the block and found nothing.
The comparison goes through a CALL now, like the two beside it, and DP2 comes
back on the entry because a RET puts it there. SplitDisk's "in use but not
reachable from the root" line is what caught it.

Refusing a name longer than twenty two used to read the twenty third character
of a shorter one, which is somebody else's string. It is measured now.

Tests/agree.sh is new and is the gate this rung was for: the same disk built
twice, once with SplitDisk and once with CosmOS, compared byte for byte. The
two share no code and only a written specification, and every field one writes
and the other only reads is checked there and nowhere else - which entry a
thing lands in, which block, what a directory's unused fields hold, the
version, the free count. It caught a wrong parent immediately when that was
broken on purpose.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 09:18:29 -04:00