HP 71B CAT$ Problem

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Today I was writing a quick program to count the files on a diskette, so I though I would just use CAT$ in a loop until the filename was null and then exit, but what happened was unexpected. The diskette I was working with was formatted with 16 sectors allocated for directory and the directory was full with 128 files on the disk. When CAT$ tried to read the next entry after 128 strange things happened. I would always get a "Loop open" message and one time the 71B even dropped out of control mode. The HPIL module is the 1B version, I will try it tomorrow with my other 71B to see if I get the same result. Has anyone else seen this before?