[comp.sys.amiga.tech] ls bugs ... one down ... one to go ...

ked01@ccc.amdahl.com (Kim DeVaughn) (08/10/90)

In article <35192@ut-emx.UUCP> mjl@emx.UUCP (Maurice LeBrun) writes:
>
> On my Amiga 3000 (Q105 drive), I believe I could get a system crash
> using ls 3.1 by doing a "ls -l env:" immediately after bootup (under
> 2.0).  I switched to ls 4.0 and have had no problems since.

You seem to be one of the lucky ones WRT "ls" (v4.0k) and a 3000!  Anything
special/unusual/etc. about your environment?


For those of you having problems ... with the help of quite a number of
people (Thank You, all!), I have finally been able to determin that there
are really TWO different problems that have very similar manifestations.

One applies only to those of you with 3000's and/or 2.0.  I haven't got
the root cause of this one isolated yet, but am in touch with someone who
also has Lattice and CPR, who has offered to see what he can find out on
his 3000.  Thanks Henrik!  Hopefully, we'll be able to get this problem
isolated now.


The second problem is seen by people with 500/2000's, running 1.3, and will
usually be seen only if you are booting directly from an FFS partition on
a hard disk (or are popping shells ith dmouse, etc).

This is the old "current dir pointer" not getting properly initialized by
the startup process bug (i.e., pr_CurrentDir is 0).  Although the root
cause of this problem isn't really an "ls" problem, I will try to put a
fix in "ls" to get around the problem in the next release (hopefully, in
about a month, depending on how successful we are in nailing the bug the
3000's have).

In the meantime, you can get around this problem by putting a "cd" command
to some legitimate directory in your s-s, and/or in the startup file for
dmouse/popcli/etc.

Note that you won't see this problem at all if you're using Bill Hawes'
WShell, as Bill goes to great lengths to insure this field (and some
others) are properly initialized at WShell's startup time.

I speculate that the reason those of us that can't boot directly from an
FFS device don't see this, is that we already "cd" from the OFS mini-
partition over to a FFS partition early in our s-s.  Doing this will cause
pr_CurrentDir to get properly initialized.


Again, thanks to all of you who have been helping to track these problems
down, and also to those of you who have provided suggestions for future
enhancement.

Naturally, v4.1k will be posted when ready.

/kim

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