RAND

Syntax

RAND (devicename) or

RAND (device$)

Location

TinyToolkit

Every physical directory device (eg. floppies and microdrives, but not RAM disks), contain a random number in their FAT (which is a place on the medium which contains internal data, the number of free/bad/empty sectors etc). The function RAND returns this number which can be used by QDOS to check if a medium has been changed.

NOTE

QDOS increases access speed by temporarily storing data in so-called slave blocks. On QDOS and compatible machines this may lead to the phenomenon that RAND only returns the correct value the first time that it is used, and then returns the same value for any other medium. This can be avoided by using the command DEL_DEFB, or better CLRMDV before each RAND.

CROSS-REFERENCE

FOP_DIR opens a directory. FLP_SEC allows you to alter the amount of checking carried out by a disk interface to see if a disk has been swapped.