Problem with disappearing history file

[Mark Nagel]

In article <264 at ispi.UUCP>, jbayer at ispi (Jonathan Bayer) writes:
|In article <5849 at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>, steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steve DeJarnett) writes:
|> 
|>      Has anyone had any problems with a history file in 2.11.14
|> that decides to disappear occasionally???  We've had this problem
|> occur enough times that I am sure it's not related to running out
|> of disk space or other hardware-related problems.  When this
|> happens, I get a message (as news) saying something to the effect
|> of:
|> 
|> 	"There was a problem with the history file.  It has been fixed."
|
|We had a problem like this a while ago.  It turned out that we were
|running 2 expires at the same time, which got both of them very
|confused and made the history file disappear occasionally.

As did we, but we lost our *active* file.  It turns out to be some kind
of bug in the SunOS 4.0 cron that caused the nightly script to execute
twice simultaneously.  I worked around it by adding a "script lock" to
the nightly script.  I.e., I just had the script check for the existence
of a lock file in /tmp and if present, exit.  If not, create it and go
on.  Haven't had any problems since.

Mark D. Nagel
  UC Irvine - Dept of Info and Comp Sci | The probability of someone
  nagel at ics.uci.edu             (ARPA)  | watching you is proportional to
  {sdcsvax|ucbvax}!ucivax!nagel (UUCP)  | the stupidity of your action.