BTW: Mark if you are running on a simulator, just create an extra drive in the RK05 driver, put 4280 blocks on it and mount it on /tmp in /etc/rc when you go multi-user.     You should be all set, and you will be running like many/most V6 and V7 systems in years gone by.

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 4:57 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
That is exactly how its was done.   In fact, DEC made a Solid State Disk (out of RAM) just for UNIX that people used to use for /tmp.


Also to be fair, Dennis did symlinks before 4.2.   They were part of the V8 I believe.  I remember talking to him and Steve Bourne about them and ideas in the FS.  Dennis's basic thesis was that while UNIX had a typed file system, he & Ken intentionally kept the number of types very very small.    The problem he was afraid of what that too many systems had ended up so many different ways to handle things.    Just keep everything as a ASCII text file and let the user space deal with it.   Symlinks, or "late name binding" for the FS was a mixed bag.    Just as Dennis predicted, Solaris was an example of an implementation that went symlink happy.

I created Conditionally Dependant Symlinks (CDSL) which I think only showed up in Masscomp's RTU, Stellix and Tru64.   The were not only late binding, but added the concept of a user settable context.   Very handy when trying to create a "single system image" from multiple system.   I miss them today from Linux clusters and even put them back into one of my systems.   B


Also, around the same time that Dennis added symlinks, Apollo's Aegis (aka Domain) guys came up with a cool idea where you can run application code from a link - extensible types.    I remember talking to Dennis and Ken about them at a SOSP IIRC, and toyed with putting them into one of the Locus UNIX Kernels.   We proposed it for HP-UX and Tru64, but never got funded to try it, although I think / believe others did some where else. 



On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 4:31 PM, William Pechter <pechter@gmail.com> wrote:
Mark Longridge wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> My root partition for Unix v6 is almost full and /dev/rk0 only has 83 blocks.
>
> The trouble is I wanted to compile bc.y and I think it needs around
> 300 blocks of temporary space. I was wondering if there was a way to
> set up Unix v6 so that it could use one of the other drives for tmp
> space. I tried to set up a link using ln but it seems I can't link
> across filesystems.
>
> The exact error is "26: Intermediate file error".
>
> I managed to rearrange things so that /dev/rk0 had over 300 blocks of
> free space and it fixed the problem, but I'm curious if there was
> another solution.
>
> Mark
Ah the good old days before BSD's symlinks.
Only thing I can think of is add another drive or partition and mount it
as /tmp.


Bill