Re: History corruption (over NFS)

[Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org>]

On 2005-02-14 10:57:05 -0800, Wayne Davison wrote:
> A little while ago I wrote a patch that caused zsh to change its
> rewriting strategy to use a HISTORY_FILE.new file and then rename it
> into place. The purpose of this patch is to avoid losing any history
> if zsh gets interrupted during the writing of the new history file.
> However, it should also be a friendlier update strategy for NFS dirs
> because the inode of the file changes.

Will the other NFS clients necessarily notice the inode change?

Anyway it seems that this solution would work. I did a test with
Emacs, which changes the inode when modifying a file, simulating
what zsh does by removing some .zhistory lines at the beginning,
and there was no problem with NFS.

> The downside is that it can undo some user's use of symlinks,
> hardlinks, or special group permissions on their history file
> (because it is replacing the history file instead of rewriting it
> in-place). Perhaps this algorithm should be made optional?

Making it optional would be a good idea, much better than requiring
some mount options (which can slow down other applications...).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA