VMS vs. UNIX file system

[Daryl Monge]

In article <68853 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>> What I would like in the UNIX file system the VMS system has is the ability
>> to break links when a file is written.
>
>This can happen in UNIX as well
>(It can, I believe, also *not* happen in VMS if your application does whatever
>magic is needed to write on an existing file rather than creating a new file
>with a higher version number.)

Sorry for not being complete enough.  We not only have our own applications, 
but normal UNIX commands need to run properly also. (ex: cc awk sed)

The observation that the VMS is not a complete solution is correct.  Some
tools modify the file in place.  However, most VMS commands work right 
on VMS linked files but most UNIX commands do not work the way I need.

Needless to way, there are some problems with what I want to do.  For
example, consider O_RDWR mode or O_APPEND.  The way you would want a link
broken in this case is to have the file copied before modified, or have some
type of block copy on write (as in paged virtual memory management.)

Daryl Monge				UUCP:	...!att!ihcae!daryl
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