csh and nfs

Stuart Levy slevy at poincare.geom.umn.edu
Sat Mar 23 05:07:17 AEST 1991


In article <9103211941.AA28942 at masig2.ocean.fsu.edu> davis at MASIG2.OCEAN.FSU.EDU (Alan Davis) writes:
>We have a NeXT machine, v2.0, nfs mounted to our 320 VGX, 3.3.1, that I have
>been having an ongoing problem that I origionally attributed to an nfs
>incompatability, but have just discovered that it is a problem with csh.  When
>I try to access a file on the NeXT machine and use the * or ? characters, csh
>returns an error message "No match". ... 

We see the same problem w/NeXT 1.0.  The fault's in the BSDreaddir() code which
csh uses -- it does directory reads into a 512-byte buffer, which the NeXT NFS
server could probably handle but doesn't.  It's disappointing NeXT didn't fix
this in 2.0.  SGI's normal readdir(), used by sh, ls, etc. has a larger buffer
(4K?) and succeeds.  I'm told by a helpful SGI person that the next major
release will have a BSDreaddir() with larger buffer, but meanwhile we're stuck.

One thing you might try in the mean time: use tcsh instead of csh.
I think there are a handful of tcsh binaries up for anonymous FTP on
tesla.ee.cornell.edu and/or ftp.brl.mil.  We have "tcsh.iris4d-irix3.3.1";
it *does* successfully glob with the NeXT.

	Stuart Levy, Geometry Group, University of Minnesota
	slevy at geom.umn.edu



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