robert@isgtec.uucp (Robert Osborne) (11/07/90)
On our brand new DECstation 5000 (Ultrix 4.0), I typed in the following command: >sort -onewfile fairlyimportantoldfile it seemed to be taking a long time so I broke it (Stupid, stupid, stupid). It totally ignored newfile and behaved as if >sort -o fairlyimportantoldfile and waited for standard input to sort into my file. So, it truncated my fairlyimportantoldfile. 1) The -o option is documented in the man page as -oname 2) Why on ^C does it truncate the file? (Nice error handling :-) 3) Do any other Ultrix commands behave this way??? (ignoring option fields, dangerous cleanup, etc.) Rob. -- Robert A. Osborne ...uunet!utai!lsuc!isgtec!robert or robert@isgtec.uucp
mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) (11/08/90)
In article <714@isgtec.UUCP> robert@isgtec.uucp (Robert Osborne) writes: Indeed, the manual page is wrong. SPR it. >2) Why on ^C does it truncate the file? (Nice error handling :-) It's probably not that ^C truncated the file, but when sort opened the file for output, it truncated it then. When you hit ^C it just exitted, leaving the file already truncated. >3) Do any other Ultrix commands behave this way??? > (ignoring option fields, dangerous cleanup, etc.) When the manual and the software disagree, the manual's wrong. :) I don't think "dangerous cleanup" is really what happened - what happened is more along the lines of: if you type "rm -rf /*" and then hit ^C, don't expect it to "clean up" for you either. :) All UNIXes are like that. mjr.
schoch@sheba.arc.nasa.gov (Steve Schoch) (11/10/90)
In article <1990Nov8.144527.10834@decuac.dec.com>, mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) writes: |> |> >2) Why on ^C does it truncate the file? (Nice error handling :-) |> |> It's probably not that ^C truncated the file, but when sort |> opened the file for output, it truncated it then. When you hit ^C it |> just exitted, leaving the file already truncated. No, that's not right. Sort can take the same file for input and output with: % sort -o file file and in this case it's can't overwrite the file before it has read it. Sort only opens the file for writing after it has sorted all the data. The problem might be that when you said: % sort -ofile anotherfile it just took "file" as more options and one of those options could have produced the symptons. Steve