Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!ukc!axion!vision!chris
From: chris@vision.UUCP (Chris Davies)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: isql command breaks (Informix SQL)
Message-ID: <675@piglet.vision.UUCP>
Date: 4 Dec 89 12:54:38 GMT
References: <955@whizz.uucp>
Reply-To: chris@vision.UUCP (Chris Davies)
Organization: VisionWare Ltd., Leeds, UK
Lines: 39
Keywords:

In article <955@whizz.uucp> bbh@whizz (Bud Hovell) writes:
-> It seems that when we invoke isql (by the user at the command line or in a
-> shell script), it sometimes works fine, and sometime just bombs out with a
-> message of "Unknown error".

Yup.  I can get it too.  It happens to me when I haven't set up the various
shell variables
	INFORMIXDIR=...				(default: /usr/informix)
	PATH=$PATH:$INFORMIXDIR/bin		(required)
	DBPATH=...				(optional)

	export INFORMIXDIR PATH DBPATH		(required - sort of  :-)

to point to things on our system (examples are for Bourne shell, "/bin/sh").

-> When this happens at night during one of the many scripted updates we run
-> under cron, it dumps ~2 Meg of junk into my cronlog, and hogs resources
-> until I manually kill the process.

I could believe this.  Perhaps you need to set these variables in your scripts?
I would NOT recommend you set them in your cron file.

-> What is also peculiar is that we have NOT always had this problem - seems 
-> to be cropping up just in the past two months. It doesn't seem to have
-> anything to do with the size of the database. We *think* we have permissions
-> and ownerships right, and there are no other mystery problems with the db
-> software.

Er.  Um.  :-(  Oh well, you probably know all of this, but I've posted this
anyway, so that it might be of help to others (whenever...).

			Chris
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