[net.unix-wizards] Anyone used the dbm

stevens (01/22/83)

Has anyone out there gone through the dbm(3) routines ?
A cursory glance at the code and it looks quite good, but there is
not a single comment in the entire program !  Before I charge off and
go through it, has anybody done it yet and/or are the routines
worth using ?
	Richard Stevens
	...ucbvax!arizona!kpno!stevens

bhaskar (01/25/83)

James Gosling's emacs for Unix uses dbm(3), and works very well.
K.S. Bhaskar (John Fluke Mfg. Co., Everett, WA)

hansen (01/28/83)

If I were writing potentially portable code, I would NOT use or recommend
using the dbm(3) routines. The routines do some strange things with casting
pointers around. For machines which care about alignment of types, such as
longs on a double-word boundary or ints on a word boundary, the dbm routines
cause core-dumps from trying to store such beasts on arbitrary byte
boundaries.
					Sincerely,
					Tony Hansen
					pegasus!hansen

regi:gsw (02/02/83)

I have used the dbm(3) routines to store C structures which I find rather
useful. I declared a structure

struct mydatum {
	union {
		char *dbmptr;
		struct gratf *gr;
	} dptr;
	int dsize;
};

where gratf is the C structure I want to store. This works fine on our 11/750.

		Gordon Watson
		...decvax!mcvax!ukc!gsw@regi