minicom error message Phonelist garbled. What to do?

I could never figure out how minicom stores its state information. Where
does it put the phone numbers anyway???? Not it /etc/minicom or such.

Now ordinarily this is not a problem: let minicom worry itself
However today there was a problem.
When I startedup minicom:
error message:
Phonelist garbled:
and lo and behold:
i can't dial my list of numbers -
it apparently doesn't remember any of them!!!

error message:
Phonelist garbled.

I dont even know where minicom keeps them. This is irritating!

Well I did this
strings /usr/bin/minicom

and i looked around to see what it had in there: and looked for Phonelist garbled :)

minicom: cannot setreuid(%d, %d)
%.*s
%s/.dialdir
Error writing to ~/.dialdir!
Manually entered number
Phonelist corrupted
Phonelist garbled (?)
cp %s %s.%hd
Old dialdir copied as %s.%hd
No connection: %s.


so clearly there is something about .dialdir

so now I did
strings .dialdir (it is a binary file :))

and I found my old modem target phone numbers.
so I copied it to a new file minicom-old-dialdir :)
and I re-entered the minicom dialto numbers and
on restarting minicom it has regenerated a new .dialdir.

Sneaky program. Resoureful user!