hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (07/22/89)
Two somewhat odd things: 1) Merge/286 refuses to run any DOS software except from the console. This is moderately reasonable for programs that use the bitmap, but not for programs marked as using streams only. In addition, the definition of console is odd. When I'm using ksh with job control, I am on an sxt, so "tty" returns /dev/sxt011 or something. This causes Merge to refuse to run any DOS programs. What's odd about this is that there is a workaround. It is to run the programs using "batch". It seems rather odd to me that you can run DOS programs using batch, which has no controlling terminal at all, but not on a real but non-console terminal. Anyway, I end up writing scripts to front end all my applications. They check the controlling terminal. If it is an sxt, they run the program via batch, piping output to the appropriate /dev/consXXX. This works fine. You'd think there would be an easier approach. Anybody know how Merge decides on its context? I'd think it should be possible to write a little jacket program that sets primary input and output to something appropriate and then exec's the actual program. 2) Has anybody seen cron get into a state where it loses /usr/spool/cron/atjobs? Somehow this happened to me. Whenever I submitted a batch job, it would run. But immediately upon termination, something (presumably cron) would unlink the atjobs directory. I killed /usr/spool/cron and brought it back from backup. Things now work fine. I looked carefully at files and protections before doing this. The only thing I see that has changed is that I had removed all files from crontabs, since I don't really want cron doing all that stuff. I just want cron to handle at and batch jobs. The crontabs directory was still there, but had nothing in it. It's hard to believe that this would cause cron to lose atjobs, but with SVr2, you never know...