guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) (12/14/88)
>And though it used to be a problem on multiuser systems where you might >not notice the messages on the console (though the system surely came to a >crawl which everyone should notice) on these mighty PC's where one always >uses the console this should be even more acceptable than before. It's arguably still a problem on those multiuser systems; they haven't gone away. Furthermore, programs should print them *anyway*; programs should check for I/O errors and report them. They should also "do the right thing" when they occur; for instance, an SMTP daemon should *not* acknowledge receipt of mail until it has written the mail out with no errors *and*, if at all possible, has ensured that the data has actually been written to non-volatile storage (using "fsync" on systems that have it, otherwise using O_SYNC mode when writing on systems that have it). As long as you're checking for errors such as this, it's not that much harder to print a message as well.... Furthermore, it's not always obvious what *caused* the file system to fill up; it might have been caused by a daemon program as opposed to a command the user ran (or it might have been caused by a background job the user started, or by somebody who remotely logged into your machine running a job, or...). A message from the program, giving the source of the message (e.g., "ld", or maybe even better "cc"), would do that better than just "/tmp: file system full".