Glenn, by chance or bad luck one of our production runs trashed older data (which resulted in severe dataloss problems. We DO have backups, but it may take months to recover from this). After a lengthy search we traced the problem down to the issue that AST mktemp generated the same temporary file names twice, almost exactly 96 hours apart. I don't know how or why (my staff is still looking), but I was told the default name length is insufficient for large, shared file systems which receive almost 2000 mktemp calls per minute from different machines. Sourly I've recognised that the problem is known by POSIX, as http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/mkstemp.html dryly remarks it's "possible to run out of letters". Yay.
My request would be to increase the default temporary file name length returned by the AST mktemp command if the filesystem supports this. Lionel _______________________________________________ ast-developers mailing list ast-developers@research.att.com https://mailman.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/ast-developers
