Someone in the newsgroup complained about zapping probing at a large
box dropped by a quantum mechanic and being told that it was empty rather
than that it held a corpse or live cat. This sidesteps the issue by
reporting "the box seems empty" instead of "the box is empty", and not
setting its contents-known flag. (That message is the main difference
between probing and the assorted other methods of observation [telepathy
and monster detection and possibly Warning for live cat, object detection
and food detection for dead cat's corpse] which might be expected to
trigger the cat's fate but don't.) This also makes probing of self and
of monsters set the contents-known and locking-known flags for containers
in inventory, same as is done for probing which hits objects. (Display of
container contents still only occurs for loose objects, not in inventory.)