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From: peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: /tmp versus temporary file types
Message-ID: <346@graffiti.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 21-Oct-85 18:06:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: graffiti.346
Posted: Mon Oct 21 18:06:13 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Oct-85 08:21:50 EDT
References: <2152@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: The Power Elite, Houston, TX
Lines: 19

> 
> Just a design note: On our IBM system files are named on CLOSE rather
> than open...
> ...
> besides tmp files it just generally guarantees that programs which
> for some reason, um, er, abend, and don't want things left around
> can have that...

But the usual case where you *do* want to keep the file around dies
horribly if you do this. Remember that one of the *nice* features of
UNIX files is that they are always "closed" from the outside. You can
always look at the output of a long-running background job without
bending over backwards...

	% nroff -ms huge_file > huge_file.out &
	% ...wait a while, maybe doing other things...
	% tail huge_file.out
	...whatever the output is, so long as it's reasonable...
	% ...and repeat...