Buffered file reading

Hi Guys, I'm making a sort of batch URL mover in Rebol. It will take it's commands via E-mail and download files from the net and upload them where specified. Naturally we need to use some sort of buffered scheme. I asked about this before and drew a blank but then I found this document on rebol.com: http://www.rebol.com/docs/network.html Take a look at the following extract; <-- Cut --> Transferring large files requires special considerations. You may want to transfer the file in chunks to reduce the memory required by your computer and to provide user feedback while the transfer is happening. Here is an example that downloads a very large binary file in chunks. inp: open/binary/direct ftp://ftp.site.com/big-file.bmp out: open/binary/new/direct %big-file.bmp buf-size: 200000 buffer: make binary! buf-size + 2 while [not zero? size: read-io inp buffer buf-size][ write-io out buffer size total: total + size print ["transferred:" total] ] <-- Cut --> Well no, that code obviously wont ever work. (total not initialised) But it's probably close. The odd thing is that it only transfers about 200000 and I'm not sure why that would be. It only seems to read a few K at a time and I've no idea why size would be zero when the magical number of 200000 is hit. Any ideas? -- Mat Bettinson - EuroGamer's Gaming Evangelist with a Goatee http://www.eurogamer.net | http://www.eurogamer-network.com

Heya Mat, MB> inp: open/binary/direct ftp://ftp.site.com/big-file.bmp MB> out: open/binary/new/direct %big-file.bmp MB> buf-size: 200000 MB> buffer: make binary! buf-size + 2 MB> while [not zero? size: read-io inp buffer buf-size][ MB> write-io out buffer size MB> total: total + size MB> print ["transferred:" total] MB> ] Actually, I got this working; inp: open/binary/direct ftp://ftp.site.com/big-file.bmp out: open/binary/new/direct %big-file.bmp buf-size: 200000 buffer: make binary! buf-size + 2 total: 0 while [not zero? size: read-io inp buffer buf-size][ write-io out buffer size clear buffer total: total + size print ["transferred:" total] ] close inp close out This works. The notable difference being the clear buffer, which was actually just a guess from me since I don't really know what it does other than resetting a pointer. -- Mat Bettinson - EuroGamer's Gaming Evangelist with a Goatee http://www.eurogamer.net | http://www.eurogamer-network.com