Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!cornell!calvin.spp.cornell.edu!richard
From: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Re: popen()
Message-ID: <1990Mar7.002520.10365@calvin.spp.cornell.edu>
Date: 7 Mar 90 00:25:20 GMT
References: <1503@loria.crin.fr> <25F00B67.17161@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <21231@netnews.upenn.edu> <348@comcon.UUCP>
Reply-To: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Organization: Cornell Space Plasma Physics Group
Lines: 28

In article <348@comcon.UUCP> roy@comcon.UUCP (Roy M. Silvernail) writes:
>In article <21231@netnews.upenn.edu>, dowding@linc.cis.upenn.edu (John Dowding) writes:
>| In article <25F00B67.17161@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) writes:
>| >
>| >   And, of course, this will take up disk space while your program is
>| >running.
>| 
>| If you write write the temp file to a ram disk, won't this give you
>| nearly the same effect as the UNIX pipe?
>
>I can't tell from experience, 'cause my wimpy litle machine only has
>640k, which leaves precious little room for a ramdisk.
>

With 4DOS, you can set variable TMP to point to a ramdisk, and all pipe
files will go there.  I run mine with a 256k e: drive and this works
for most things.  It is amazing how few programs check status on writes though
- very few report errors when the ramdisk fills up during a pipe operation.
This gives strange truncation of the data file the reason for which might not
be obvious.
I guess people don't expect discs to fill up anymore.
Given how often our 300+ Meg drives fill up on our research machines, I try
to check all writes (when I can be bothered).

Richard Brittain,                   School of Elect. Eng.,  Upson Hall   
                                    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
ARPA: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu	
UUCP: {uunet,uw-beaver,rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!richard