CBFalconer said:
You seem to have reading difficulties. I didn't ask, I advised.
He didn't say you asked. He advised you to ask.
You also failed miserably to mark the snippage, which explained why
'that doesn't work'. Get a good nights sleep.
What you wrote was:
| As a general precaution that doesn't work on Winders or MS-DOS.
| The reason is that various manufacturers (Borland is one)
| arbitrarily open files for read in read-write mode, and this fails
| miserably. If you are using Borland compilers, and know about it,
| you can compensate. If not, tough.
The file in question was a copy of a draft of the C standard, not
something that would be opened using a Borland compiler or any other
compiler.
I'll have to take your word for it that some applications open files
that they don't intend to modify in read-write mode, and fail if the
file doesn't have write permission. I've never encountered such a
thing myself. If nothing else, setting an input file's permissions to
read-only could be a good way to flush out such applications.
But upthread, Richard Heathfield said that he had a bad habit of
"reading the Standard with vim, rather than less". vim and less are
originally Unix applications, but versions are available for Windows.
vim in particular is perfectly capable of opening a read-only file.
Setting the file's permissions to read-only certainly would solve the
problem of accidentally modifying it with vim.