Ultrix4/Risc/Crond stangeness

[Johan Vromans]

[Consider this a warning, since I don't know who/what to blame...]

System: DECsystem5000, Ultrix 4.0, Perl 3.0 pl 28 (cc compiled w/o -O).

A file system maintenance script mysteriously fails when run under
Paul Vixie's cron daemon. It doesn't fail when run interactively, or
from Ultrix cron. I haven't noticed failing it on other systems
(VAX/Ultrix3.1/Crond and HP9000-320/HP-UX6.2), nor have I noticed
other programs running from the cron daemon to fail.

The program creates three output files:

    $where = "/var/tmp/";
    $logfile = $where . "fscan.log";
    $symfile = $where . "symlinks";
    $dirfile = $where . "dirfile";
    open (LOGFILE, ">$logfile") || die "Cannot create $logfile [$!]\n";
    open (DIRFILE, ">$dirfile") || die "Cannot create $dirfile [$!]\n";
    open (SYMFILE, ">$symfile") || die "Cannot create $symfile [$!]\n";

Although output is written to all three files, the first file remains
empty on disk.

However, when I exchange the first two open commands:

    open (DIRFILE, ">$dirfile") || die "Cannot create $dirfile [$!]\n";
    open (LOGFILE, ">$logfile") || die "Cannot create $logfile [$!]\n";
    open (SYMFILE, ">$symfile") || die "Cannot create $symfile [$!]\n";

all three files are written OK.

The program has been rewritten substantially without affecting the
failure, only the above exchange of open commands seems to be a work
around. 

Puzzling, isn't it...

	Johan
-- 
Johan Vromans				       jv at mh.nl via internet backbones
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