Operating System Limitations

This section describes how MHonArc determines which operating system is being used and what limitations exist for the given operating system.


OS Detection

MHonArc will automatically detect which operating system it is running under. If the following list of conditions are true, MHonArc assumes it is running under MS-DOS:

If any of the above conditions is false, MHonArc assumes it is running under Unix.

NOTE
The previous conditions are used since the conditions will exist if Perl has been installed on an MS-DOS machine. None of the above conditions exist when Perl is installed on a Unix system.

Unix Limitations

No limitations exists when MHonArc is used on a Unix system. The only constraints that may exist are memory and disk space.


MS-DOS Limitations

The following descibes the limitations, or changes to default behavior, if running under MS-DOS:

As under Unix, MHonArc's capacity to process messages under DOS is constrained only by memory and disk space. It has been tested with over 1000 messages in one archive. However, this can require a great deal of memory. BigPerl can be configured to use virtual memory if your real XMS memory is insufficient. BigPerl also can run under Microsoft Windows 3.1x, using Windows' own virtual memory.

Be aware that MHonArc stores its archive as one file per message plus an additional two index files. On a hard drive with 8K clusters (256K to 512K partition), this can consume a great deal of overhead space if your messages are small. For example, 100 messages averaging 1K in size use 100K to store their data but take up 800K of disk space. (This may not be true under some disk compression drivers.)


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MHonArc 1.1.0 -- Operating System Limitations