rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson) (09/05/85)
For your info: I recently posted a question and the answer was interesting to me, so I thought I'd share it. I had exchanged the locations of my news filesystem and my swap area on physical disks so I could increase the size of the news filesystem. I told config to swap onto /dev/ra1e. However, I forgot to rm /dev/swap and do a mknod for the new swap area. Therefore, ps went nuts and kept showing me all sorts of bogus processes that had command-names that were teeny excerpts from news articles. My question was why the system was not brought to its knees and why my news filesystem was not scrogged if I was swapping onto it. What happened was that the system WAS swapping onto the new swap area; /dev/swap is present only for the benefit of ps. So any process that was swapped was showing up as garbage on a ps; other processes were reported OK. /dev/swap is just the default argument for the optional -s switch of ps which tells it where to look for info on swapped processes. -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj ...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj