ps/swapping question answered -- for your info

[Curtis Jackson]

For your info:
I recently posted a question and the answer was interesting to me, so
I thought I'd share it.  I had exchanged the locations of my news filesystem
and my swap area on physical disks so I could increase the size of the
news filesystem.  I told config to swap onto /dev/ra1e.  However, I
forgot to rm /dev/swap and do a mknod for the new swap area.  Therefore,
ps went nuts and kept showing me all sorts of bogus processes that had
command-names that were teeny excerpts from news articles.  My question
was why the system was not brought to its knees and why my news filesystem
was not scrogged if I was swapping onto it.

What happened was that the system WAS swapping onto the new swap area;
/dev/swap is present only for the benefit of ps.  So any process that was
swapped was showing up as garbage on a ps; other processes were reported
OK.  /dev/swap is just the default argument for the optional -s switch
of ps which tells it where to look for info on swapped processes.
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj
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