deleting blank records & error capture

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: scooter6 at gmail.com
To: Filepro List
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 5:18 PM
Subject: deleting blank records & error capture


Running 5.06.09 on Unix -- 

Two questions I have --

> 1) first - We have a temporary file where new input gets put in
> and a night process that copies that data into the 'big' master file
> how do I delete the 'blank' records that get created in this temp file?

Just have the process that copies the records also delete them.
The disk space is not freed, but so what? The record is freed in that it 
will just get filled again tomorrow night. Say you get 1000 records in every 
night. Do you really care if the key file shrinks to the size of 1 record, 
grows to the size of 1000 records and shrinks back to 1 over and over every 
day, or just stays the size of 1000 all the time? In reality the file will 
bump up and get larger once in a while whenever your import is larger than 
usual, but it doesn't grow and grow every day in a scenario like you 
described, so unless you get truly stupendous amout of incoming records once 
in a while and don't want the file to be 2 gigs all he time when usually it 
only needs to be 20 megs, I think there is nothing to fix here as long as 
you are using the processing delete command on each record after processing 
it.



> 2) I have a big night time process that runs
> that has been getting stuck on certain parts
> I have a script that runs all these processes
> and I have a log that tells me when each individual process starts
> so I have an idea where it's getting stuck
> but it's getting stuck on different processes randomly
> how can I set the cron job on a Unix box where it will capture
> the error messages that filePro is encountering?

If you don't redirect stdout & stderr, they will get collected and emailed 
to root.

Or, you can rdirect stdin, out & err all to one of the unused console tty's 
and flip to that screen when you come in in the morning, or use doublevision 
to view that tty any time from anywhere.

crontab -e
30 2 * * * myscript </dev/tty12 >/dev/tty12 2>&1

Then hit Alt-F12, or Ctrl-Alt-F12 if the console was in X (the scologin 
gui).
You can flip to that screen any time before during or after the cron job 
runs. It will just be black before, and will be inactive, but with the last 
output of the script on it, afterwards if the script completed normally. If 
the script hun and is waiting for user input, then the screen will still be 
active, the script will still be running and you'll be able to interact with 
it and supply whatever user input it's expecting.

If it's just hung on locked records (pretty common)
then you can set 2 environment variables in the script before any 
clerk/report commands
PFMBTO=1 ; export PFMBTO
PFSKIPLOCKED=1 ; export PFSKIPLOCKED
That will cause fp to proceed past most common halts.
Though beware, only you can say if skipping locked records is ok for the 
reports in question!
Consider: Your process is cycling through the days invoices, and needs to 
lookup into the customer file for each one, and someone went home with your 
biggest customers account open on their screen in update mode, and so that 
lookup fails on most of the invoices for that the day as if there were no 
such customer...

The proper fix might be to somehow ensure that all users or at least all 
filepro processes are out of the system before starting the script. A cheap 
way to start might be to use the idleout utility in sco. just type "idleout 
120", and until the next reboot, any tty that sits idle for 2 hours will be 
killed. If everyone usually goes home by 8pm and the script doesn't run 
until midnight, this might clear up most of the problem most of the time.

I would not set those variables first or use idleout at first, but see what 
the captured messages indicate first. It may be something completely 
unrelated to locked records.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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