OS/X Tiger loses files/folders?

I have an AppleScript that I developed on OS/X Panther (10.3.9). It
traverses a folder structure and renames any folders or files that have
troublesome characters in their names, or whose names are too long.
(These folders and files have to be moved via FTP to various other
systems, including OS/9, Linux, WinNT, Win2000, and WinXP, so we need
lowest-common-denominator names.)

The script works beautifully on my system, happily traversing folders
of a gigabyte or more. On my colleagues' systems, which are OS/X Tiger
(10.4.6), it works great too, on smaller amounts of data. But when run
on a larger set, even a set that includes the smaller set that worked
great, it loses some files. The lost files are, in some cases, the same
files that were properly processed when they were part of a smaller
set. The pathnames are identical, but when these files are in amongst
too much data, they disappear rather than get renamed.

The loss is consistent; it's always the same files, and it's quite a
lot of them. It's looking like either a memory issue or that there is
something in the larger set of data that's causing otherwise-OK files
to be lost. If it's the latter problem, it isn't something "nearby",
like under the same parent or grandparent folder (we've checked), so I
could be in for a long track-down. Also, it's very mysterious that the
exact same data on my own system gets processed properly every time,
whether it's the larger data set or the smaller.

Does this ring any bells for anyone out there? Make any sense?

Thanks in advance --

On 16/06/2006, larrysulky.RemoveThis@gmail.com wrote in message
<1150470103.703914.236900.RemoveThis@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>:

> The script works beautifully on my system, happily traversing folders
> of a gigabyte or more. On my colleagues' systems, which are OS/X Tiger
> (10.4.6), it works great too, on smaller amounts of data. But when run
> on a larger set, even a set that includes the smaller set that worked
> great, it loses some files. The lost files are, in some cases, the same
> files that were properly processed when they were part of a smaller
> set. The pathnames are identical, but when these files are in amongst
> too much data, they disappear rather than get renamed.
>
> The loss is consistent; it's always the same files, and it's quite a
> lot of them. It's looking like either a memory issue or that there is
> something in the larger set of data that's causing otherwise-OK files
> to be lost.

There is a strange bug with 10.4 where if there are lots of changes to
filenames too quickly one-after-another, the Finder loses touch with the
files and they apparently disappear (though they're actually still there,
as 'Terminal' will prove). I see this most frequently with decompression
programs like Stuffit Expander which create and rename large numbers of
files in a very short time.

One thing that might help your script is to put a pause in it immediately
after every rename. A simple 'delay 10' instruction should suffice. It
will, of course, make your script take longer to finish, but it might make
it work, and it should run nicely in the background while the user does
something else.

Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk