Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ginosko!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Csh brain damaged, but then you already knew that.
Message-ID: <2457@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 16 Sep 89 19:25:00 GMT
References: <6331@watdcsu.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 25


 >This happened on a vax running 4.3BSD or something like it:  
 >
 >watdcsu % history | tail -5
 >tail: : open of temporary file "5.a" failed -- Permission denied.
 >
 >It also happened on a Sun running SunOS4.0.3:
 >
 >shine22% history | tail -5
 >tail: : open of temporary file "7.a" failed -- Read-only file system.
 >
 >The problem seems to be that csh tries to create a temporary file in
 >the current directory, and in the above two cases I didn't have the
 >necessary permissions.

Wanna bet?  I just tried running "history | tail -5" under "csh" under
SunOS 4.0.1 in a directory to which I didn't have write permission, and
it worked just fine.

What's more, I couldn't find any error message string like that in the
source to the 4.3BSD "csh" *NOR* in the source to the 4.3BSD "tail", and
"strings" didn't find it in the SunOS 4.0.1 binaries, either.

Maybe you've got some mutant version of "csh" or "tail" there, and
*that* version is the putatively "brain-damaged" oone?