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configure incorrectly approves system mkstemp on Tru64 os


From: Danny Levinson
Subject: configure incorrectly approves system mkstemp on Tru64 os
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:33:55 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

Configure only tests to see if it can create up to 30 temp files using the system mkstemp. (Ref: in coreutils-5.0, configure, line 27177 or aclocal.m4, line 3463). However, the system mkstemp in Tru64 unix will only create up to 32 temp files per process. See for example:

http://www.ornl.gov/its/archives/mailing-lists/tru64-unix-managers/2001/08/msg00307.html

A symptom of this problem is the error message "cannot create temporary file" when trying to sort large files on a system where dataspace limitations require the creation of many temporary files. See for example the problem reported by Frank Parkin a year ago:

http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00892.html

Changing the test in configure to look at, say, 36 files causes the coreutils version of mkstemp to be used in preference to the Tru64 version and eliminates the problem.

Side note: the reason that even a large Tru64 system will only create small temp files may be that the soft or user limits (in particular, the datasize limit) are, by default, set much smaller than the hard or system limits. Faster sorts can be achieved by adjusting these up using the shell limit or ulimit command.

Thanks for the excellent work,

-- danny levinson







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