[TUHS] Scratch files in csh

[Clem Cole]

Indeed - that's how UCB Systems worked.  /tmp was a small scratch disk and
anything there was suspect.  Scratch files were not a CShell feature, they
were a UNIX feature, very much needed on the 16-bit address PDP-11 where it
was developed.

   The idea originally became popular with Dennis's C Compiler which used
it for the intermediate files between the passes on the PDP-11.   On a
large public system like a University, /tmp would fill with cruft.   It was
traditionally removed on reboot.  But that was not good enough for
production systems that did not reboot.

    My memory is that there was a script that was similar to what Aharon
suggested that ran in the early hours of the day, although before it ran it
created a time_stamp_file with touch(1) set to be 6 hours previous so the
script let anything under 6 hours survive using a negation on the -newer
time_stamp_file clause.

Clem

On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 8:51 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> Edouard Klein <edouardklein at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I saw this on  https://old.reddit.com/r/unix :
> >
> > http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/no-itch-to-scratch.html
> >
> > It's about (the lack of) scratch files in csh. Maybe somebody here know
> > what happened to the feature ?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Edouard.
>
> From the phraseology in the paper ("The system will remove ....") it sounds
> to me like it was not a csh feature at all, but rather that the UCB
> systems had a cron job to run something like
>
>         find / -name '#*' -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;
>
> It's easy enough to research this in the archives, if you have the energy.
> :-)
>
> HTH,
>
> Arnold
>
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