[TUHS] Scratch files in csh

[Clem Cole]

I should add, my memory is that the script was done that way before -mtime
switch added; but its a tad fuzz -- many, many beers ago.
ᐧ

On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 9:31 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> 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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