rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) (12/29/90)
Followups diverted to comp.unix.aux, since this is pretty Unix-specific stuff here... gee@client2.DRETOR.UUCP (Thomas Gee ) writes: >As well, I run into continual problems with collisions between access >permissions and Mac applications. Many (most?) applications have *very bad* >error recovery and announcement facilities. Very true, but I'm not sure how much that's got to do with your problems here... > A case in point: MacWrite II. >Like most Unix systems, I set the access permissions on "/" to 666 >(thats "dr-xr-xr-x" for you beginners :-). I hope you actually set it to 755 or 755 (that's "drwxr-xr-x" or "dr-xr-xr-x"); setting it to 666 ("drw-rw-rw-") will cause all sorts of havoc for programs that expect to be able to use paths starting from "/" (i.e. practically everything). >(thats "dr-xr-xr-x" for you beginners :-). MacWrite II creates a temporary >file under "/". So, invoke MacWrite II and CRASH (panic: alloc: dup alloc). >Lovely. Very graceful. I *seriously* doubt that anything MacWrite II did caused that panic, except insofar as MacWrite happened to find a part of your filesystem that was corrupted. That panic (meaning that the filesystem code tried to allocate a block that was already allocated to some file) means that some part of the filesystem structure on disk was seriously confused. Be sure to run fsck on that filesystem as soon as possible just to make sure there's nothing still wrong with it. As for running MacWrite II under A/UX, I'm pretty sure a friend of mine has done it without problems (personally,I use Epoch and TeX and avoid Mac word processors like the plague :-). I'll ask him next chance I get to see if there's anything special he had to do... While I'm here, I might as well comment on one way in which Unix-style permissions help MacOS a lot. I'm sure all of you who use MacOS have experienced the dread disorder of Creeping System Corruption, where your system starts to act more and more strangely until you surrender and re-install the System. Well, this happened to me under A/UX on the copy of the System used to run MacOS programs under A/UX, so after re-installing the System file from the distribution disks, I changed it to mode 444 (that's r--r--r--, i.e. read-only, for you beginners :-). Funny, but I haven't had a case of Creeping System Corruption since... -- Richard Todd rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us rmtodd@servalan.uucp "Try looking in the Yellow Pages under 'Psychotics'." -- Michael Santana