Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!eds1!jdm1
From: jdm1@eds1.UUCP (Jon McCown)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: V1.3 cat /dev/null != EOF  ? (have you seen this?)
Keywords: MINIX 1.3  /dev/null does not return EOF when read ?
Message-ID: <424@eds1.UUCP>
Date: 7 Dec 89 17:08:12 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: EDS - Senate of Pennsylvania
Lines: 28

(Apologies in advance if this is old news or previously discussed)

I am building/have built  v1.3 from the 1.2+Upgrade kit, and encountered
the need to rebuild the libc.a so as to include such niceties as swab and
strrchr.  (no problem here)  

Using the "Zevon" library rebuild script, I let the machine crank on for a 
couple of hours, after which time it howled to a halt with a full hard disk.
(this is a 10 meg partition!)  Andy's notes indicate that the 'full' library
took up a bit more space than the distributed one, but this amazed even me.

Dissecting the library rebuild script ("run") and executing it in
discrete steps, I noticed that what croaked the process was:

cat /dev/null > newfile

Which seemed innocent enough to me, until newfile (or whatever) grew to
fill the HD.  I haven't yet gotten into the FS code to look, but has anyone
seen this before?  My 1.3 is the one distributed in the ../src/tools of the
upgrade kit, as I wanted to get the libc.a up to snuff before recompiling.

Jon McCown

Can't wait to get my hands on shoelace!
-- 
             J.D. McCown - RCSG Director - Senate of Pennsylvania  
psuvax1!eds1!jdm1    (this space intentionally     "Your life or your lupins!" 
jdm1@eds1.eds.com      filled with this text)                   - Dennis Moore