odd occurences with Merge/286 and cron

[Charles Hedrick]

Two somewhat odd things:

1) Merge/286 refuses to run any DOS software except from the console.
This is moderately reasonable for programs that use the bitmap, but
not for programs marked as using streams only.  In addition, the
definition of console is odd.  When I'm using ksh with job control, I
am on an sxt, so "tty" returns /dev/sxt011 or something.  This causes
Merge to refuse to run any DOS programs.  What's odd about this is
that there is a workaround.  It is to run the programs using "batch".
It seems rather odd to me that you can run DOS programs using batch,
which has no controlling terminal at all, but not on a real but
non-console terminal.  Anyway, I end up writing scripts to front end
all my applications.  They check the controlling terminal.  If it is
an sxt, they run the program via batch, piping output to the
appropriate /dev/consXXX.  This works fine.  You'd think there would
be an easier approach.  Anybody know how Merge decides on its context?
I'd think it should be possible to write a little jacket program that
sets primary input and output to something appropriate and then exec's
the actual program.

2) Has anybody seen cron get into a state where it loses
/usr/spool/cron/atjobs?  Somehow this happened to me.  Whenever I
submitted a batch job, it would run.  But immediately upon
termination, something (presumably cron) would unlink the atjobs
directory.  I killed /usr/spool/cron and brought it back from backup.
Things now work fine.  I looked carefully at files and protections
before doing this.  The only thing I see that has changed is that I
had removed all files from crontabs, since I don't really want cron
doing all that stuff.  I just want cron to handle at and batch jobs.
The crontabs directory was still there, but had nothing in it.  It's
hard to believe that this would cause cron to lose atjobs, but with
SVr2, you never know...