Re: informix 4.x stuff & SCO Open Server Release 5

John Beaudin wrote: > The binaries worked OK under SCO ODT 3. On OSR5, I get phenomena like > > a) isql not able to see all *.sql files in current directory > (28 exist: it sees 25) > > b) r4gl not able to see all *.4gl files in current directory > (5 exist: it sees 3) > > All the files in question are 777, same owner, same group. > > Granted that nobody said that 4.x was binary compatable with OSR5, I > am suprised (I'm probably naive) that these programs can't read the > current directory reliably. > > Does anybody think that there should have been a way to write their > interface portably ? > > My filesystem type is HTFS. The directory format of HTFS is different from the earlier S51K and EAFS filesystem formats. Yes, there is a fine portable way of accessing directory information, which all applications *should* be using. However, in the real world, some don't. I don't know whether Informix 4.x is such an application, but let's assume for the moment that it is. The filesystem drivers in SCO OpenServer Release 5 can recognize an "old" application which attempts to read directory entries the old way (by parsing the directory data itself). The filesystem contrives to present the data in the old S51K directory format. What you're describing makes it sound like this is *almost* working. We recently discovered a bug in how the directory translation is implemented. An application which blindly reads data from the directory will be fooled. If it first does a stat() on the directory to determine how much data to read, it'll get the directory's size in terms of its native HTFS format. That size will be different than it would have been in S51K format. If the HTFS size is smaller, some of the files in the directory will be missed. BTW, you can make a rough estimate of the "S51K size" of the current directory by doing: `ls -a | wc -l` and multiplying the result by 16. The "HTFS size" is as shown by ls: `ls -ld .`. The translated S51K format uses 16 bytes for each entry and truncates filenames longer than 14 chars, so you can differentially bulk up the HTFS size by creating very long filenames. To test whether this is the problem, create several extra files in the directory (with long filenames -- here_is_a_junk_file_with_a_long_name.1 through 10, for example). Then see if Informix finds all of its files. The other thing you could do is to create an EAFS filesystem on which to store the Informix data files. Note that the same filesystem driver is used to operate EAFS and HTFS filesystems, under Release 5. This means that EAFS filesystems get the same logging, checkpointing, etc. benefits as HTFS. HTFS features which are not available with the EAFS filesystem format are: versioning/undelete; >64K inodes; >2GB filesystem size; in-inode symbolic links. >Bela<