Msg 103 is 19 line(s) on 02/12/88 from JAY SAGE
to BRIDGER MITCHELL about BGII PROBLEM WITH FLOW CONTROL

Rick Charnes first pointed out and I confirmed that some flow control
tests that work under ZCPR3 do not work under BackGrounder.  Specifically,
these are the tests that refer to disk files, such as IF EXIST, IF EMPTY,
IF SYS, IF RO, and so on.
 
This problem was causing me particular grief recently as I tried to
implement an alias to use SAVSTAMP.  File-existence tests kept giving the
wrong result.  I have finally figured out what is causing the trouble,
and looking back I should have been able to figure this out long ago; I
had seen several clues.  First, IF.COM, when invoked directly (say by
renaming if to COMIF.COM and running COMIF EX FN.FT;IFQ,FI) always gave
the correct answer.  The problem only occurred when control was passed
from the FCP module.  The second clue I had was that under BGii, there
were occasional strange accesses to one of my floppy drives.  Finally
today I noticed that when I entered "IF EX FN.FT" the light on my floppy
drive B kept flashing even though I was on ramdrive M:.  The answer is
that BGii is losing track of the logged-in directory in the process of
calling on the FCP module.  By entering "IF EX M0:FN.FT" I can get the
test to return the correct answer.

MSG # [last msg = 300] : or COMMAND (? for help) ?