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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Unlinking Tempfiles, FIFOs
Message-ID: <21735@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 22-Jun-87 14:10:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.21735
Posted: Mon Jun 22 14:10:37 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Jun-87 04:58:13 EDT
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> Darned if I know if there are even FIFOs permitted in NFS/Sun UNIX,
> but if they're gonna be SystemV compatabile they're
> going to have to address it.

They are, starting with release 3.2, and they are S5-compatible.
They don't buffer data on disk, though.  The question of "what
happens when you unlink an open file over NFS" was answered by
somebody else earlier; if the file is being held open by a process on
the same machine, the system notes this fact and renames the file
rather than unlinking it.

> Of course, if you have Suns and sockets and such you can use other
> (koff koff) "simpler" "better" ways of writing servers.

Note that one advantage of using sockets - Internet-domain sockets,
anyway - is that the client and server need not be on the same
machine.

> Worse, most programs that do this assume that read(2) and write(2) never
> fail...

Well, programs shouldn't do that.  Disks get I/O errors, network
connections time out, file systems fill up, etc., etc.; if this
happens, most people would prefer to hear about it rather than simply
having programs mysteriously and silently fail.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com