Technical Q&A's

OPS 08 - Bizarre Extension Loading Order: BackQuote Sorts Between "A" and "B." (09-Feb-96)

Q I tried to get an extension to load last in the initialization or startup sequence, so I put the back quote character, "`" , as the first character in its name. But when I did this, it actually loaded near the beginning. What's up?

A If you view the contents of any folder by name, you'll see that items whose names begin with the back quote appear last (or nearly last) in the list. The Finder calls PACK 6 to sort the list, which uses the international sorting routines; these sorting routines order words beginning with a "`" near the end of the list.

During INIT loading, however, PBHGetFInfo() is called and it, in turn, calls RelString(). RelString() is called with case insensitivity and diacritical sensitivity. Unfortunately, due to a bug that HFS relies on, back quote sorts between "a" and "b". This means that extensions beginning with a "`" load after extensions beginning with an "a" (or an "A") and before those with a "b" (or a "B").

There are no plans to fix this problem in order to maintain compatibility with old HFS volumes (which were created before this bug was discovered and which use this sorting order).

Interestingly, UpperString() converts a "`" into an "a", but leaves all other non-letters unchanged.

If you want to make sure that your extension is loaded last in the initialization process, use the tilde (~) as the first character of its name.

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