I'm using Windows98 on my home PC. I have a collection of Video CDs (VCD) of recent movies.

Yesterday I discovered that a CD has been badly scratched near the end.. I tried to watch it to see what happens, near the end of the movie (at the credits) the computer crashes.

I tried to copy it to the hard drive, to burn it on a new CD, but the copy fails at 99% ; Windows fails to copy the last 10 Kb of the file and messages an error, without closing the file...

I had to save the remaining data of the file, so I ran to perl;

#!perl -w

open READ, 'f:\mpegav\avseq01.dat';
binmode (READ);
open WRITE, ">c:\CD\scream3.dat";
binmode (WRITE);

# If the file read fails, the script won't die, the eval
# just fails, and I can close the file. :)
eval {
    while (<READ>) {
    print WRITE $_;
    print tell (READ) ," bytes\n"; # just to see some action on the sc
+reen.
    }
};

close (WRITE);
close (READ);
[download]

Not very much of a smart code, but it saved my movie...

now what would have happened if the scratch was in the middle of the file???