Shareaza occasionally creates ill-behaved files

[Lanigiro]

I can now confirm that 2.7.7.0 did not fix yet another longstanding bug, this time with ED2K.

Once in a (usually long) while, a file that Shareaza downloads will be created in a wonky state where it cannot be opened, moved, or otherwise interacted with, only deleted, and then only from the command line. Trying to open, rename, move, or delete such a file in Explorer results in the incorrect message "Cannot find this item. Try again?" where "try again" does nothing useful, just repeats the bogus error message. Trying to open, rename, or move the file from the command prompt likewise fails, incorrectly claiming "The system cannot find the file specified" even though a directory listing clearly shows that it is right there. Trying to delete the file by name from the command prompt also doesn't work, but everything else in the download directory can be moved elsewhere and then "del *.*" will delete the wonky file. "Copy *.* otherdir/foo.ext" very rarely works, but usually either claims "The system cannot find the file specified" (even while claiming the pattern matched 1 file rather than 0 files -- internally inconsistent! The file both exists and doesn't exist, like some quantum thing!) or else produces a corrupt "foo.ext" that's only a few bytes long (even if the original is several megabytes). Copying to "otherdir/" without simultaneous renaming can actually result in creating a new file that is "contaminated" with the same wonky behavior as the original, again rarely (usually the copy just fails), which indicates that the cause of the problem is possibly something in the file's name rather than its content. A control character perhaps?

Until the wonky file is dealt with, it causes additional symptoms. For example the Windows picture previewer stops working if one tries to use it to view any file in the download directory (not just the wonky file). Once the wonky file is removed the previewer works again on any other files that are moved back into that directory, and on which it had been failing before the wonky file was eliminated.

I have only ever encountered this situation with files downloaded from ED2K. So it seems there's a problem with Shareaza's implementation of that specific protocol. Possibly it permits characters in file names that Windows dislikes and that G1, G2, BT, and DC++ all disallow.

Suggested fix: identify the specific cause, and if it is file names with characters that provoke bugs in Windows, add a step to Shareaza's handling of download files to transform any such characters into underscores (or something) when creating and naming the new file when a download completes. For good measure, such a transformation might as well be applied regardless of how the file was downloaded; it may merely be that the problem is much rarer on the other P2P networks rather than absent, or that a network Shareaza supports in the future, which may not even have been invented yet, has/will have the same filename character permissiveness as ED2K.

Of course, the true site of the bug is in Windows, not Shareaza, as it should for every possible file name either reject the creation of a file with that name or accept it and then work with it normally, and for these files it's doing neither, letting the file be created and letting it be wildcard deleted but not working normally with it otherwise. But it's highly unlikely that Microsoft will ever bother to fix this, as it's gone unfixed for a decade or two now with no sign of ever being fixed (probably it's existed since Windows 95 introduced long filenames on Windows, so, two decades), so the next best alternative is for Shareaza to avoid provoking the Microsoft bug. Shareaza's bug, then, is in occasionally provoking a longstanding Windows bug of some sort when something (likely substituting underscores for some sort of control characters when naming downloaded files) would suffice to avoid provoking it.

[queuesclimber]

Can you please rephrase your question to easier english and shorten.
Or maybe in german(me) or russia(dev) or french(SuperOD) ?
http://www.babelfish.de is fully overburden (for/with) translating it.
Please remember, community is broken. We are non-us, ATM. But multi-language.
Try your talents. We also accept chinese.