Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!newstop!sun!coherent!dplatt
From: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: sort problem while running expire -r
Keywords: sort Sun temp /tmp
Message-ID: <34850@coherent.coherent.com>
Date: 27 Sep 89 21:28:09 GMT
Distribution: news
Organization: Coherent Thought Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 40

I'm becoming quite frustrated, and could use some help if there's
anybody out there who has encountered this problem before.

I'm unable to run "expire -r" to rebuilt our news history file.  Expire,
itself, has no problems... but the sort process it forks off dies
messily, because our root partition doesn't have enough space for the
temporary sort files.  We have about 2.5 megs free in our / partition, on
which the /tmp directory lives... and that's where Sun's "sort" puts its
scratch file(s).

I've tried recompiling expire, using the -T option to redirect the
temporary files to another filesystem on which more space is available.
I've been unsuccessful.  I've tried specifying "-T/usr/tmp" and
"-T/usr/tmp/", but neither appears to have any effect... sort still
places its "sm" temporary file in /tmp rather than in the directory I
pointed it to.

I've tried running "sort" manually, specifying the -T option.  The
option is apparently accepted (no error message is displayed), but it
has no apparent effect.

It looks as if this is a bug in Sun's "sort" program (and thus perhaps
in BSD sort as well?), and that I may be unable to sort any file whose
size exceeds the amount of space available in the root partition.  If
so, this is quite unfortunate.

Has anyone else tackled this problem successfully?  I realize that I
could probably symlink /tmp over onto another file-system... but the
thought of doing this makes my skin crawl.  Are there any other
solutions, other than hoping that Sun fixes 'sort' someday?

Configuration: SunOS 3.5 running on a 3/280.  News 2.11B, patch level
17.


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