Forums Bug Reports A strange Logging bug

yea so im checking my mirc logs in the logs directory, and i notice that one log of a certain room i chat in is 89 MB, i think geez i didnt think they talked that much, so i open the log with notepad and find out that the same log is duplicated literally about 100 times, so i delete the extra garbage in it , which brings the log down to a nice 1 mb sized log....but then after i save it, it shows that its 89 mb again, so i think, wtf?........i open the log in notepad, and i notice that all of what i deleted turned to 88 mb of blank space !!! what is up with this? id like to keep the log but i dont want it to be 89 mb !!!!!

Try the following, if you want to keep the log.

Open the file & then cut and paste the part you want to keep. Then paste into a fresh file.

When this is done, you can delete the old file.

I think opening a file that large can have it's problems if you are trying to edit then save a change. I was actually surprised you even managed to open it with notepad.

The other thing is,.. if you did manage to open such a large file, I have a feeling the repetitive log isn't repetition at all, but rather since the file is so big, you are unable to view it without problems in your notepad. Same goes for the blank file you got,.. there's text there, but you're unable to view it as the file is too large.

Have you tried opening the file with other software? Word, perhaps?

As for the bug in mirc - ... what bug are you referring to..? The file being so large (which isn't necessarily a bug) ,.. or the problems with editing a text file (which has nothing to do with mirc itself).

I haven't had problems with opening largish (50 MB+) files in notepad since back in the day when it had a limit of like 64KB. I think the bug would be the repetition of text in the file. The evidence that it wasn't notepad is that he said it was 89MB, but not that much chatting had happened, and indeed, when he trimmed the log file it got down to around 1MB. Unless some script or external program is somehow duplicating text in the log, it is an mirc problem. That means that the next logical step is to ensure that it is mirc by unloading all scripts (or just install a fresh copy of mirc to a new folder) and closing any unnecessary programs.

As for why there were megs and megs of blank space where you had previously deleted a lot of text, that could also be explained by a script or third-party software. The previous advice should help to check that out. Or, perhaps mirc continued writing to the same byte offset in the file even after it was truncated, leaving all that space. If you still had mirc open when making changes to the log, that doesn't sound completely unreasonable. I have no idea how likely it is, but it may be worth looking in to.

Also, it might be useful to know what OS/mIRC version you are running, as well as any other bits of info that might help to narrow down the problem.

hmm.. tried out loading up a large file myself - 100mb

You're right, it did open,.. after a good 5 minute wait for notepad to unfreeze. Nevertheless, all the file was viewable.

Anyway, what I'm about to say may be unrelated to this problem, but worth checking out if if you are still stuck for answers..

About a month back I did have some large files which contained nothing but text. All of a sudden, I found whenever I opened files, there were blanks all over the place where there shouldn't have been.

Paranoid about viruses, I saved what was left of the files as it was better to keep most of what I had, than nothing. And I scanned the files on another pc -- no virus found. I opened the file.. all the text was there.

Where was the problem... the problem lie in that my HD was on the verge of failing, and I only realised once it actually did fail. As I mentioned the first signs were my text files that I was working on while it happened... followed by Windows behaving odd.

I reformatted, reinstalled windows & got half-way through the installation when my pc warned me the HD wasn't useable.

It's not to say that's your problem, but anyway, i'll throw it out there for you to check. Most pc's have a self diagnostic for that sort of thing. Or you can download diagnostic software from the maker of your HD.

I hope your problem is much simpler than this.

thanks guys, it did seem to be a bug in mirc, the first time i opened it and deleted all the duplicate text, it did refill what i had deleted with blank space, but the way i fixed it was i just closed mirc and then deleted it again. this time it stayed deleted and the log is now about 1 mb. Im not sure why mirc was doing it, but i will follow up and see if it happens again.