.laff I discovered this by accident since last checking this thread.
I was in a big hurry to get out the door so I hit the kill switch on
my UPS. When I powered back up I discovered the .tmp file was still
there. Ah ha.... It works whether using Firefox or IE.
I was going to ask if there was a better, less jury-rigged way to do
it. But I see several people came up with the same solution. Might
give unlocker a try.
But how are they preventing you from copying the file when Imeem is
active? I've never encountered a file that couldn't at least be copied
whether it was being used or not.
Operating systems support various flavors of file locks.
According to this, you may be able to check the properties
of the file, while it is locked, but not be able to do things
to it. So the first thing you'd want to acquire, is a utility
that can tell you more about the file, while the file is
under the control of Flash. (Maybe something in the Sysinternals.com
collection...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking
http://www.sysinternals.com (now owned by Microsoft)
One mechanism that might work for defeating the lock, is if the
place the file is stored, is on a "foreign file system". Say
you had a share set up on a Linux box over Samba, and opened a file
for locking on it. Windows might try to lock the file, but maybe the
foreign file system doesn't support locking, or doesn't support
it quite the same way. Then, if a process is running local
on the Linux box, it may be able to copy the file any time you
want. (Windows thinks it is locked, when in fact it is not.)
Now, because Windows likes to put so much stuff on the C: drive,
this might not be as easy as it sounds. People writing programs,
know that the C: drive is a more secure place to do stuff, so they
may prevent places other than C: from being used. In that case,
the plan isn't going to work. Sometimes you can set an
environment variable, to declare a TMP directory, and
perhaps changing the pointer to that in your Windows
environment variables, would allow changing where the file
is stored. It depends on whether Flash honors such a variable.
If I was writing Windows code, I would ignore the user
Safer that way.
So you'd need some knowledge of the more intricate details
of file locking on Windows, to find a weakness and exploit it.
I used to do various kinds of experiments on Unix boxes, years
ago, with the two kinds of locks that were supported, for things
like figuring out who owned the department's only license key
for a computer program. But in that case, the Unix I was using
had a very nice development environment. I could write short programs
to do whatever testing I wanted. I don't think there is
such a thing as "a short program" on a Windows box
Paul
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