> Could someone here slap me upside the head and point me in the right > direction?
makewhatis is a shell script that does all sorts of hokey stuff with shell redirection, like opening its own fds for stderr (example: echo blah >/dev/stderr) and for "stdout" too (example: echo blah >/dev/tty). Practices such as this in shell scripts are marginal at best, and it could probably be argued that these coding techniques are simply wrong. For example, confusing /dev/tty with stdout is typically a mistake made by people who have been infected with the idea that the C shell is an acceptable shell to do any work with. Perhaps there's a reason why the code does all of this, but if there is, I don't know what this reason is. Anyways, makewhatis does a lot of work using such hokey shell redirection techniques, and in the end, all of these techniques end up truncating stderr. So, during the period of time that makewhatis is running, it's not surprising to me that the fs is reporting that the file is growing, but in the end, eventually the code in makewhatis truncates the output file one last time, resulting in the 33 bytes that you see. --kevin -- Kevin D. Clark / Cetacean Networks / Portsmouth, N.H. (USA) cetaceannetworks.com!kclark (GnuPG ID: B280F24E) alumni.unh.edu!kdc _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
