Arena data gone between shows !

[karron at KARRON.MED.NYU.EDU]

I am allocating an arena, and each program that uses it checks the value
in usgetdata(). If it is zero, then assume that the arena is a virgin,
and the first thing that any of the programs do is setup a directory
of addresses for data structures inside the arena, and then uscalloc()
the data structures.

I find that if all of the programs associated with an arena terminate, then
the data inside the arena is corrupted, deleted, or somthing, but the
value in usgetdata() is untouched.

If I do an od of the data, I can see the strings that my programs left
behind, but something is wrong from the programs point of view.

I would like an arena to preserve its state between programs. Is that possible ?

An additional note: Is there anyway to identify arenas as special files ?
The file commands does not recognize then. I have not tried workspace default
sgi rules. Are they tagged ? Since I don't want to delete old arenas, is there
any way to clean them out if they are not touched for a day or so ? I know
that they don't use up disk space, but they do use up more valuable core.

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