Stuck on decoding, tried to manually decode but that didn't work either

[crevicetool]

Apologies up front for not really knowing what I'm doing, but I've downloaded a very big item, and alt.binz (0.25) got stuck decoding.  It was minimized to the tray, I clicked on it to check the progress, and it closed instead of opening.  I re-started it, and it resumed downloading, but I noticed a ton of files were backed up on decoding.  Here is an example from the log:

[7/27/2010 12:22:57 PM] [Dec] Exception Cannot create file "". The system cannot find the path specified
[7/27/2010 12:22:57 PM] [Dec] Firstpart=1;NumOfParts=218;Encoding=Yenc;fsize=100431872;fname=(null);Outputdir=D:\shares\Downloads\bigfile;OutputdirExists;Size=100431872;Expandingfile;FreeSpace=4620611096576;AfterExpandingfile;fname=(null);fnameafter=(null)xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;

That just repeats over and over.  I previously downloaded a smaller one where the file names were (null), and each one has a different number of x's behind it.  I did some searching and discovered this can happen, sometimes due to long paths.  My directory names aren't very big, but I can't do anything about the long file names.  But I found there a suggestion to manually with yencdecode.  So I resumed all the par2 files that were paused so I'd have all the files, then I did as instructed in the post and put yencdecode in the temp folder, and ran it.  But I soon realized that it was creating a file named (null), deleting the temp folder it came from, the just overwriting that same file and moving on.  I freaked out because it seemed as if it was deleting all the data I downloaded without actually doing anything, so I killed it.

Any suggestions at this point?  Is there an easy way to just download those files that yencdecoder deleted? 

Thanks!

[Hecks]

The posting tool has messed up by producing malformed yEnc headers with (null) filename.  Not much you can do about it, I'm afraid, apart from to chalk this up to experience.  There's a *lot* of crap on usenet posted by peeps who don't have a clue, and it's really best to stick with trusted sources.  This will keep you saner in the long run, no matter how tempting that !!!-->>>my1337downloaddz.NL<<<--!!! 50GB post may look ...
 

[crevicetool]

Ok, thanks.  Is there any way to figure out which parts are now missing due to yencdecoder deleting them?  I'd like to re-download just those parts if at all possible.  While the headers may not be "correct", I do know these files have worked for others, so perhaps I just need to handle these manually.  I don't think the null filename itself is the problem (the smaller file I downloaded was named just the same, and worked fine), I think it's just the fact that for this null filename an extra "x" got added to the end of each filename, eventually making it too long (this bigger file got 60% decoded before it bombed out, by that time the file names just had too many x's).

If I have to proceed manually, that's fine, I'm just trying to figure out how to do it without having to re-downlaod the data I already have.

Thanks!

[Hecks]

Well, you'd have to manually rename each of those null filenames to ... something.  How you'd figure out which was which now I don't know.  But the filenames should be in the original subject lines, if you were dl'ing them one by one you could pause & rename ...

Perhaps ask those others you mentioned how they managed it?

[crevicetool]

Perhaps ask those others you mentioned how they managed it?

Well, the answer was: they just used newsleecher.  I downloaded the newsleecher trial and tried it with one of the smaller downloads that had the null naming issue, and newsleecher did find the right names for them.  I don't know what it's doing differently.  I was hoping that since I've already downloaded all the data for this huge file with altbinz, there'd be some way I could get the data out of those temp files without having to re-download all of it all over again with newsleecher.  I did copy the contents of the temp file to another folder and just let yencdecode do it's thing, and it did indeed just work it's way through each one, overwriting the last one with the current one.  Effectively just deleting all the data one at a time.  I guess the alternative is to put each one of the folders in the temp folder into it's own folder, then process them one at a time, giving them a new name (like null1, null2, etc), then let quickpar run to see if it can extract the names?

[Hecks]

Ah, Newsleecher must be using the par2 to rename them.  There's an open request about that here somewhere ...

Yes, QuickPAR should also rename the files for you.