home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- From: Stephen Usher <steve@earth.ox.ac.uk>
- Subject: Re: Mint library ramblings...
- Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 07:56:16 +0100 (BST)
- In-Reply-To: <9306152226.AA01500@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu> from "Nicholas S Castellano" at Jun 15, 93 06:26:37 pm
- Mime-Version: 1.0
-
- >For testing I was compiling Eric's port of the GNU fileutils. I
- >decided to try to figure out why cross-device mv's have never worked
- >correctly on my system. It seems that the copy() routine it uses to
- >copy from one filesystem to the other does read()s and write()s with a
- >size of 8K, and this is what was causing it to have strange results.
- >
- >Is it a known bug in earlier versions of GEMDOS that you can't
- >reliably Fwrite() more than about 1K at a time? If so has it been
- >fixed? Or is the problem elsewhere (ICD driver? I think I had this
- >same problem under AHDI 3.01 as well.)
-
- Hmm.. well a copy of cp I wrote which tried to copy as much as possible of a
- file at a time always worked under both MiNT and TOS (1.02, 1.04 and 3.05).
- I've used it under AHDI 4.xx and 5.xx and with the ICD utils from version 3
- onwards.. maybe there's still a bug in the fileutils mv across filesystems.
-
- >The consequences of these long writes can be anything from an address
- >error to a total system crash (usually with a spectacular amount of
- >trash dumped to the console).
- >
- >Another unrelated problem (feature?) that I noticed is the library's
- >behavior of chown() on TOS partitions. Currently it gives a -1
- >return, with errno indicating an invalid function. My feeling is that
- >this is a bit too paranoid, and that it would be reasonable to return
- >success from chown() if Fchown() returns EINVFN. Or is this just
- >asking for trouble?
-
- I think it, and chmod(), should return success else some installation
- programs and makefiles will break needlessly. Just because this filesystem
- doesn't support the notion on ownership or the execute bit doesn't mean that
- the program which has tried to do the operation is in error, after all, the
- files seem to be owned by the user trying to do the operation, how on earth
- is the program going to know that it can't work?
-
- >
- >cheers,
- >entropy
- >
-
- Steve
-
- --
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Computer Systems Administrator, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Oxford University.
- E-Mail: steve@uk.ac.ox.earth (JANET) steve@earth.ox.ac.uk (Internet).
- Tel:- Oxford (0865) 282110 (UK) or +44 865 282110 (International).
-