Millisecond Forums

Bug report: Inquisit repeatedly opens instances trying to open .gz

https://forums.millisecond.com/Topic35314.aspx

By LTK - 4/18/2023

I experienced a debilitating fault after trying to open a .gz file using Inquisit: it repeatedly opened new instances, about one per second without limit, not stopping until I shut down the system entirely. The file in question is named just like the .iqdat files I have for single experiment data files, so I assume it's a data file that Inquisit saved as .gz, but it's from 2022 and I don't remember why it was saved like that. The file itself simply consists of tab-seperated values, so I'm not sure why Inquisit shows this extreme behavior when trying to open it. The only reason I opened it with Inquisit is because that is the program associated with the .gz filetype in Windows Explorer, which I also assume is for a reason. 

The forum does not accept .gz files so I changed the extension to .txt and uploaded it here. I am hesitant to try to replicate it because my computer becomes borderline unusable when the window focus changes to a new instance of Inquisit every second. This occurred on Windows 10 Enterprise and Inquisit 6.5.2.
By Dave - 4/18/2023

LTK - 4/18/2023
I experienced a debilitating fault after trying to open a .gz file using Inquisit: it repeatedly opened new instances, about one per second without limit, not stopping until I shut down the system entirely. The file in question is named just like the .iqdat files I have for single experiment data files, so I assume it's a data file that Inquisit saved as .gz, but it's from 2022 and I don't remember why it was saved like that. The file itself simply consists of tab-seperated values, so I'm not sure why Inquisit shows this extreme behavior when trying to open it. The only reason I opened it with Inquisit is because that is the program associated with the .gz filetype in Windows Explorer, which I also assume is for a reason. 

The forum does not accept .gz files so I changed the extension to .txt and uploaded it here. I am hesitant to try to replicate it because my computer becomes borderline unusable when the window focus changes to a new instance of Inquisit every second. This occurred on Windows 10 Enterprise and Inquisit 6.5.2.

> The only reason I opened it with Inquisit is because that is the program associated with the .gz filetype in Windows Explorer, which I also assume is for a reason.

Inquisit does not register the .gz extension by itself, so the problem is that you associated Inquisit with that extension. Reverse that, and things will be fine.

It is the case that the Inquisit Web app will gzip-compress data files to minimize storage on device and data upload volume. These data files will get decompressed once received by the server. If you moved those files directly from a device ( https://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/current/html/howto/sharedata.htm ), extract (decompress) them first using a suitable application. Macs should handle .gz fine out of the box. Under Windows, you can use a free archiving utility like PeaZip ( https://peazip.github.io/ ).
By LTK - 4/19/2023

It is the case that the Inquisit Web app will gzip-compress data files to minimize storage on device and data upload volume. These data files will get decompressed once received by the server. If you moved those files directly from a device ( https://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/current/html/howto/sharedata.htm ), extract (decompress) them first using a suitable application. Macs should handle .gz fine out of the box. Under Windows, you can use a free archiving utility like PeaZip ( https://peazip.github.io/ ).


That must be what happened then. Maybe I moved that single data file from somewhere before it was decompressed, but it's still strange that it does not appear to be compressed as renaming it to .txt opens the file normally, whereas using 7-zip on the .gz file does not work. I suppose I might have tried to open the .gz with Inquisit with the assumption that this would work given the origin of the file, but I do not remember anything like this happening before. I'll disassociate the file type so I don't make that mistake in the future, but in any case, it's very unexpected that any program would produce this kind of behavior when trying to handle an incompatible file type, so this seemed worth trying to fix for that reason.