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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uunet.ca!cognos!dealwisb
From: dealwisb@cognos.com (Brian de Alwis)
Subject: Re: extract etc01 problem?
Message-ID: <1992Jul26.144325.20251@cognos.com>
Summary: negative values in df(1) reports
Organization: Cognos Incorporated, Ottawa CANADA
References: <HUDGENS.92Jul25181644@sun13.SCRI.FSU.EDU> <1992Jul26.095910.29737@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE>
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 14:43:25 GMT
Lines: 35
In article <1992Jul26.095910.29737@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE> kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de writes:
>>extract: etc01.xx : open: too many open files
>>
>I got this same problem with etc01. When I looked at 'df's' output I saw
>that my disk had run full free -18619 106% (maybe the negative number is not
>a bug but a feature?)
BSD's FFS reserves (by default) 10% of each disk to aid in allocating
contiguous blocks for files. Once this 10% is reached, only root is
allowed to allocate further files. The percentage and avail fields in
df are actually reported as compared the remaining 90% of the disk.
So, if you have 92000 blocks allocated, and your disk has 100000
blocks (of which 10%=10000blks are 'reserved'), df would report that
there were -2000 blocks, or 102%, free. See df(1) as well.
The errors extracting the etc01 distribution are because extract
simply cat(1)'s all of the etc01.* files into a pipe - but as
distributed, cat(1) does not close each file-descriptor when finished
with the file [at least, this is what I gather from previous msgs
about this]. A solution may be to do the extract yourself:
for i in /tmp/etc01.*; do cat $i; done | uncompress | cpio -idalmu
(in Bourne shell - I don't like or use C-shell) This should close each
file after cat(1)'ting it, but will be much slower (you'll be running
60-odd cat(1) processes sequentially).
This problem is because the default maximum-of-open-files per
process is 64 - three are already taken used as std{in,out,err},
leaving only 61.
Hope this helps.
--
+++BdA Brian de Alwis. Brain on loan to Cognos Inc, Ottawa, Ontario.
dealwisb@cognos.com, or bsdealwi@napier.{waterloo.edu,uwaterloo.ca}
"Nine out of ten men who tried camels said they preferred women"