Thanks for the suggestions. My example was simplified. The actual files in questions and not straight incrementing serial numbers. They actually contain a version number. Here is an example:

WIM_TOOLS_5.1.1.100.txt

I just tried my little fake file idea, and it works perfectly.

Funny, I was stumped by this for 2 hours. 2 minutes after I posted my question that idea spring into my head.

I'm having a problem with _FileExists. It seems like this function does not handle wildcards.

My goal here is to see if there are any files in the same folder where the program is located named Trash1,txt, Trash2.txt, Trash3.txt, etc.

Take this as an example:

If _FileExists("Trash*.txt") Then
    Kill "Trash*.txt"
End If

The above program would fail to delete those files because _FileExists appears to be unable to handle wildcards.

If I would run the kill command by itself, it would successfully delete those files. However if there are no files named Trash*.txt, then the kill command would cause a failure in the program so I have no choice but to determine if any files named Trash*.txt exist first and that is what the "if" statement is supposed to do.

Since _FileExists won't work for this, can anyone suggest a workaround for me?

LOL. I actually used the word LIMIT in the title of my question.

I amuse myself sometimes :-)

Thanks!

Thanks for the responses. Much appreciated.

I can't believe how much misinformation there is on this topic.

First, I might note that the opinions I'm expressing comes from someone with 12+ years experience specifically working with storage hardware for a major NAS / SAN company.

Let me start very simply: These ideas that all kinds of things need to be moved off an SSD are utter nonsense. That's old school thinking from before the times where the OS is SSD aware. This whole paranoia over rapid wear of an SSD is simply overblown. Even cheap consumer SSDs are highly unlikely to exceed their usage specs within 5 years.

Let's take a simple example:

I have a Seagate Firecuda 520 2TB SSD with a TBW (TeraBytes Written) rating of 3,600. Let's say I want to ensure that I get a 5 year lifespan out of this drive. This would mean that I could write 1.97 TB of data to that drive EVERY SINGLE DAY for 5 years. I don't know about you, but I don't often write that much data to a drive in a day.

Let's assume I had a 1TB SSD. That would cut the TBW rating in half which would allow for 0.98 TB written every single day for 5 years. That's still a tremendous amount of data.

As for the OS itself, any modern OS is very much SSD aware and has strategies to avoid excessive writes to the SSD. Of course, if you over tax a system, for example, trying to perform heavy video editing tasks on a system with only 4GB of RAM, you are going to force the system to utilize paging a lot more often. Spec out a system with reasonable amounts of RAM for the tasks you plan to undertake, and you might be surprised how little data gets passed through the paging system.

I'm sure that many of you have laptops that have no spinning disks, only SSDs. Have ANY of you ever actually exceeded the TBW rating of your SSD in 5 years or even 10 years???

I'm going to admit something: I was once paranoid about the short lifespans of SSDs myself. But with the advent of modern operating systems and the knowledge gained having to deal with these issues on a professional level, I now hammer away on my SSDs with reckless abandon :-)

Do I still use fixed platter HDDs? Sure. I have a media library in excess of 40TB so large fixed platter HDDs are perfect for that only because of their far better pricing for large drives, however, I may re-evaluate that soon as 8TB SSDs are starting to creep down in price.

It makes sense that focus would shift from the IDE to my program when an Input statement is encountered, but I find that when I read from a file using Input$ the focus also shifts. Is this expected behavior for some reason?

Here is a sample clip. Simple step through the code line by line and note that the line "Temp$ = Input$(FileLength, 1)" will cause focus to shift to the console. Same thing happens when a console window is used.



   

If there is one thing that I learned from repeated test compiles and debug sessions tonight, it's that it is tedious as heck putting the watch variables over and over again each time I make a change to the code. Don't get me wrong, it's well worth the effort, but how about this...

How about once I enter all the variables to watch, having a way to export those to a file. Then, the next time I run the program, I could import that same list. I can then add to or remove from that list of variables to watch, but I have a starting point so that I don't need to manually select every variable over and over and over.

Is that something that would be doable, eventually?