Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Comments on INSERT.c Message-ID: <863@auspex.UUCP> Date: 18 Jan 89 18:53:58 GMT References: <308@twwells.uucp> <313@twwells.uucp> <273@chessene.UUCP> Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 27 >>did mention that this was BSD dependent. People who want to run INSERT >>are strongly urged to get a BSD-based UNIX system. > >Oh good grief. > >That's the silliest statement I've ever seen on Usenet. OK, a non-silly statement of the same basic warning would be: People who want to run INSERT should note that, due to the way it is obliged to work in order to achieve the goal for which it was designed, it must be able to call a procedure that will, given a file descriptor or a path name, truncate the file referred to by that file descriptor or path name to a specified, and possibly non-zero, length. BSD-based UNIX systems (which include systems not explicitly advertised as such) have such a call, named "ftruncate", and other UNIX systems may also have such a call, whether named "ftruncate" or not. INSERT cannot be run on systems lacking such a call. (As for it being "the silliest statement (you've) seen on Usenet", I, at least, have seen far "sillier" statements on USENET; one common category is the bold claim, presented as fact, that can be shown to be completely false by trivially looking something up.)