OT: broken/useless ansi - console driver??

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005, John Esak wrote:
...
>It's even more hassle for others than myself...here is a forwarded message
>from a friend.
>
>....
>
>John,

>This issue is even more serious than I previously thought (at least for me)
>because when writing server programs, I have to code and test, code and
>test and I used to get an error when trying to place a new version over a
>running one (because the PC side is already connected - very common), but
>now it just copies without an error then I get a core dump by the server in
>the background and everything crashes.  I thought the issue would only come
>up with software installs, but for me, it can be tons of times in a day.
>Now I know why I always seem to have a recent /core file with OS6...

>Now I have to be super careful to stop everything before I copy over every
>single recompiled version (which is every few minutes for me).  VERY
>tedious.

Not to diminish the gravity of this change in behaviour, I would suggest
that one's installation procedure should take this into account by moving
the old executable to a backup name before replacing the compiled binary,
something like this in a Makefile:

BINARY = progname

$(BINARY): $(SOURCES)
	# build something resulting in $(BINARY).new
	mv $(BINARY) $(BINARY).bak
	mv $(BINARY).new $(BINARY)

This has the advantage that if the new one is broken, it's easy to move the
backup copy back to the real binary location.  It shouldn't break running
programs (at least on *nix systems) as the paging mechanism should be
looking at the inode, not at the file name to determine where the
executable is.  I have no idea how the Windows virus would handle this as I
don't do Windows.

Bill
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