How To Stop GnuCash from Saying It Cannot Find a Specific File

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 2/28/2017 4:50 PM, Bored Accountant wrote:

> -List or Reply-All.
> No offence, but that seems like bad programming. For example, in the
> Audacity audio editing program, when you move or delete a project and then
> click the "Open" menu function, Audacity will throw the error that it cannot
> find the file, *but then Audacity will remove the project from the "Recent"
> menu*. And that's not the only piece of software that will account for
> people deleting or moving files. In fact, most software will not only have
> "failsafe" code programed into the software to specifically handle these
> types of situations; but will even give you the option to delete files from
> within the software thus avoiding the situation altogether. I noticed that
> GnuCash doesn't even have an option to delete files from within the
> software. Again, this seems like bad programming.
Not just that it is "free software".

You have made assumptions about WHY one might get a "file not found". 
For example, were I a user of "Audacity" and I started the program 
without remembering to "mount" to the file system wherever that file DID 
reside and "Audacity" removed that file from the "recent" list I would 
consider THAT to be a bug << I am not running under a 'nix OS where 
quite common to mount or umount portions of the file system on the fly 
-- but even running under Windows I do plug in and remove mountables 
like external hard drives, USB drives, etc. Some people have their data 
out on the web. The program should do something drastic if told to open 
but the network connection goes down?>>

I think the reason that the developers made gnucash by default open the 
last file opened is that most gnucash users will only have one file. 
That saves them the step we folks who use gnucash "nofile" have to go 
through to select the file they want. Obviously gnucash users like me 
who are keeping several books will use "nofile" because we DO have to 
choose.

But as for "what was the last file opened" being dependent on whether 
that file still exists (at all) or is currently available to the file 
system, I disagree. Why should THAT have anything to do with the answer 
to the question "what WAS the last file that was open?". Perhaps gnucash 
should have a function allowing user modification of this list because 
they aren't keeping a lot of different books (for those of us who are 
keeping four or more, an unused "recent" will soon disappear).

Michael D Novack

PS: Before the house fire 10 years ago, one of the organizations for 
which I keep books had its own machine. We stopped doing things that 
way. Its files are now on one of my machines, and I turn over periodic 
copies. But suppose I was going to go away for a while and somebody else 
do the bookkeeping in my absence. Wouldn't it make sense to have the 
organization's files on an external drive that could move back and forth?