itty bitty IRIX questions

[Dave Olson]

In <9105311819.AA02956 at gsusgi1.gsu.edu> syscrc at GSUSGI1.GSU.EDU (Randy Carpenter) writes:
| I have a few miscellaneous IRIX questions:
| 
|   1.) Where can we get the SGI diagnostic programs that are supposed
|       to be in /usr/diags?  By default, there's nothing in the 
|       directory.

They are in eoe2.sw.diags, if I remember correctly, and are machine
specific.  In fact, the subsystem is empty for 4D20, 25, and 35 machines.
For the PI products, MOST of the same diagnostic functionality is
in the 'ide' program run from the PROM menu.  The non-PI products
mostly don't run standalone, and so live in /usr/diags.

|   2.) Why does ps(1) take so long every once in a while but then
|       has good response at other times.

If you change /unix, or remove /tmp/.ps_data, the file gets re-created,
which takes a while.  After that ps runs faster.  Basicly it saves ps
having to grub through the kernel symbol table on each invocation.

|   3.) Why doesn't ex(1) and vi(1) look at the TMPDIR environment
|       variable like ed(1) to allocate buffers?  The default root
|       partition on SGI systems doesn't leave enough space in /tmp
|       to edit huge files.  I don't want to have to worry about
|       every user having to "set directory=/usr/tmp" in their .exrc
|       files and I don't want to expand the root partition.

Well, you could just symlink /tmp to /usr/tmp... vi long predates
the TMPDIR convention, and since the equivalent functionality is
already present, there has been no urgency to add another; one
would then have to decide which set of tmpdir specifiers take
precedence.  You could also do set the EXINIT variable in
/etc/{profile,cshrc} so your 'naive' users get your default, while
experienced users can easily override it.
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.