sticky bit

[T. William Wells]

In article <8724 at alice.UUCP> debra at alice.UUCP () writes:
: In article <314 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
: >... [arguments about sticky bit deleted]
: >
: >I just did my editor, compiler, make, and ls.  That seems to be
: >sufficient.
:
: Sufficient for what? I have run several tests on different systems, both
: with and without virtual memory, and have never found any improvement by
: setting the sticky bit for any program.

Program development on my system. It is a 16MHz 386, 4M RAM, 80M 28ms
seek time disk.  I run Microport's SV/386 3.0e (the latest).  Load
time on my editor, for example, is cut from about three seconds on
initial startup, to under a second. Compile times are cut similarly.
(Most of the compile time seems to be related to loading the compiler
passes!)

: Considering the annoying side-effects of sticky-bit programs (you cannot
: overwrite them easily, you cannot unmount file systems, etc) I would not
: recommend using the sticky bit anymore.

I have no problem with unmounting my /usr file system, even though I
have a sticky-bit program (my editor) on it. Overwriting, on the
other hand, still requires deleting the file first.

---
Bill
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