.goutputstream-XXXXX - possible to relocate? - unix

I've been trying to create a union file system for a college project. One of its features that differentiates it from unionfs is the fact that there are no copy-ups. This means that if a file is located in a certain branch, it will remain there even if it is written to.
But my current problem with that is the fact that .goutputstream-XXXXX are created, renamed, and deleted whenever a write operation occurs. This is actually OK if the file being written to is in the highest priority branch (i.e. the default branch where files can be created), but makes my kernel crash if I try to write to a file in a lower branch.
How do I deal with this? How can I rig it so that all .goutputstream-XXXXX files are written to only one location? These .goutputstream-XXXXX files seem to be intricately connected to the files they correspond too, and seem to work only the same directory as the file being written to.
I also noticed that .goutputstream-XXXXX files appear when a directory is read. What are they for, anyway?

There has been a bug submitted to the ubuntu launchpad in which the creation of .goutputstream-xxxxx files is discussed.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/984785
From what i see now, these files are created when shutting down without preceding logout, but several other sources may occur, like evince or maybe gedit.
maybe lightdm has something to do with the creation of these files.
which distribution did you use?
maybe changing the distribution would help.

.goutputstream-XXXXX created by gedit and there is no simple way (menu or settings) to relocate them.

Related

Is it possible to define a cross-platform working directory for R?

I am teaching R tutorials in person w/ a large number of undergraduate R novices. I am also trying to format my notes on RPubs so that they can easily be used by other people. Nothing derails things faster than people mis-specifying working directories or saving spreadsheet files to someplace different than their working directory.
Is it possible to define a working directory that is universal across platforms? For example, a line of code or a function like
setwd( someplace that is likely to exist on every computer)
This could involve a function that finds some place the usually exists on all computers, such as the desktop, downloads folder, or R directory.
In general your best bet is to go for the user's home area,
setwd("~")
path.expand("~")
Since you are teaching novices, a common problem is that students notice the R package directory ~/R/ and assume that they should put their scripts this directory; thereby creating odd bugs. To avoid this, I would go for
dir.create("~/RCourse", FALSE)
setwd("~/RCourse")
If you use RStudio, you could get them to create an RStudio project.
In the past, I have come across situations where this doesn't work. For example, some people have their home area as a network drive, but can't connect to the internet or get through a firewall.
You asked about
someplace that is likely to exist on every computer
and yes, R works hard to ensure this returns a valid directory: tempdir().
The main danger, though, may be that this directory will vanish after the session (unless you override the default behaviour of removing the per-session temporary directory at end). Until then, it works.
Still, this can be useful. I sometimes use that to write temporary files I don't want to clutter in the current directory, or ~.
Otherwise #csgillespie gave you a good answer pertaining to $HOME aka ~.

Use Fossil for system files?

As a new user of Fossil, I'm curious if there are any negative implications with using Fossil to store things like /etc/, /usr/local/etc files from Unix like systems like FreeBSD & OpenBSD. If I'm doing this for multiple systems, I think I'd create a branch with each hostname to track those files.
Q1: Have you done this? Do you prefer a different VCS to handle the system files?
Q2: Lots of changes have happened in Fossil over the years and I'm curious if it's possible to restrict who can merge branches with trunk. From reading earlier threads it wasn't possible but there are two workarounds:
a) tell people not to merge to trunk
b) have people clone and trunk maintainer pick up changes from their repo
System configuration files stored in /etc, /var or /usr/local/etc can generally only edited by the root user. But since root has complete access to the whole system, a mistaken command there can have dire consequences.
For that reason I generally use another location to keep edited configuration files, a directory in my home-directory that I call setup, which is under control of git. Since I have multiple machines running FreeBSD, each machine gets its own subdirectory. There is a special subdirectory of setup called shared for those configuration files that are used on multiple machines. Maintaining multiple copies of identical files in separate repositories or even branches can be a lot of extra work.
My workflow is the following;
Edit a configuration file in my repository.
Copy it to its proper location.
Test the changes. If problems occur, go back to step 1.
Commit the changes to the revision control system. Copy the
committed files to their proper location.
Initially I had a shell script (basically a list of install commands) to install the files for me. But I also wanted to see the differences between the working tree and the installed files.
So for my convenience, I wrote a script called deploy to help me with this. It can tell me which files in the repo are different from the installed files and can show me the differences. It can also install files to their proper locations.

cleartool update error in Solaris Unix

I am working on a view created from the main code repository on a Solaris server. I have modified a part of the code on my view and now I wish to update the code in my view to have the latest code from the repository. However when I do
cleartool update .
from the current directory to update all the files in the current directory, some(not all) of the files do not get updated and the message I get is
Keeping hijacked object <filePath> - base no longer known.
I am very sure that I have not modified the directory structure in my view nor has it been modified on the server repository. One hack that I discovered is to move the files that could not be updated to a different filename(essentially meaning that files with original filename no longer exist on my view) and then run the update command. But I do not want to work this out one by one for all the files. This also means I will have to perform the merge myself.
Has someone encountered this problem before? Any advice will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
You should try a "cleartool update -overwrite" (see cleartool update), as it should force the update of all files, hijacked or not.
But this message, according to the IBM technote swg1PK94061, is the result of:
When you rename a directory in a snapshot view, updating the view will cause files in the to become hijacked.
Problem conclusion
Closing this APAR as No Plans To Fix (NPTF) because:
(a) to the simple workaround of deleting the local copy of renamed directories which will mitigate the snapshot view update problem and
(b) because of this issue's low relative priority with higher impact defects
So simply delete (or move) the directory you have rename, relaunch you update, and said directory (and its updated content) will be restored.
Thanks for your comment VonC. I did check out the link you mentioned, but I did not find it much useful as I had not renamed any directory. After spending the whole day yesterday, I figured out that I had modified some of the files previously without checking them out first. This made me to modify them forecfully as they were in read-only mode as they were not checked-out. This resulted in those files to become hijacked, and hence when I tried to update my view to look at all the modifications in the repository, it was unable to merge my modified file with that on the server as those files were modified without being checked out so the cleartool update was made to believe that the file is not modified(since it was not checked out) but actually it was. That was the fuss!! :)

What should I actually *do* in AnkhSVN when two people edit the same file under SVN

Our code is in SVN. We develop using Visual Studio and the AnkhSVN plugin.
Having used VSS before SVN I was used to the idea of locking files so other users know not to edit it while you are (in fact I thought this was the main point of source control, to prevent lost data from these conflicts).
I've been told this rarely happens and cases where you can't work because another dev is locking you out are more frequent (which sounds like a principle that might only apply to a certain subset of dev projects). But anyway, SVN is better and we're using it.
So when I do edit a file, and go to check it in, and find out the other user has edited it too, what do I actually do?
Surely there's a better way than saving a copy of my file, reverting changes, updating it from server, then merging my changes back in with winmerge? When I right-click the file and click 'merge' I'm told I should update first, so that's obviously not what I need.
.
Update: partial answer
OK, it sounds like I just hit update, then SVN merges non-conflicting changes automatically, and should let AnkhSVN know about any conflicting changes to allow some kind of resolution. Does anyone know how this works in AnkhSVN - what I'd actually do?
(if not I'll try it myself, accept the current top answer and update this question with the second half for posterity).
Actually, that's exactly what you need.
Edit: Clarification, what you need to do is just hit that update. You don't need to make a separate copy, revert, etc. Updating from the repository will merge those changes with your own.
When you do the update, where you have local changes to a file that has also been changed in the repository, SVN will merge the file in the repository with your local file, preserving both sets of changes.
In effect, it should do what you would do with Winmerge automatically.
If the changes are conflicting, typically that they occur within the same lines, there will be a merge conflict, which has to be resolved. Not knowing AnkhSvn, I don't know what it will do in this case, but it should have some means of fixing things. Usually it involves looking over 3 files (your local file, the repository file, and the result of a successful merge) where you pick each part you want to keep from the two changed versions of the file.
After you've updated your local copy, merged and fixed any conflicts, you commit as usual.
It´s not an direct answer to your question, but I would recommened to use SVN-Monitor in addition to AnkhSVN or any other Subversion client like TortoiseSVN.
With it you can watch your repository and will be notified by changes in your repository. So you can see what other devs did in the repository and probably see if your commit will conflict with other checkins or if you can update your local copy without any effect/conflict

How to let humans and programs access the same file without stepping on each others' toes

Suppose I have a file, urls.txt, that contains a list of URLs I'm monitoring. My monitoring script edits that file occasionally, say, to indicate whether each URL is reachable. I'd like to also manually edit that file, to add to or change the list of URLs. How can I allow that such that I don't have to think about it when manually editing?
Here are some possible answers. What would you do?
Engage in hackery like having the program check for the lockfiles that vim or emacs create. Since this is just for me, this would actually work.
If the human edits always take precedence, just always have the human clobber the program's changes (eg, ignore the editor's warning that the file has changed on disk). The program can then just redo its changes on its next loop. Still, changing the file while the user edits it is not so nice.
Never let a human touch a file that a program makes ongoing modifications to. Rethink the design and have one file that only the human edits and another file that only the program edits.
Give the human a custom tool to edit the file that does the appropriate file locking. That could be as crude as locking the file and then launching an editor, or a custom interface (perhaps a simple command line interface) for inserting/changing/deleting entries from the file.
Use a database instead of a flat file and then the locking is all taken care of automatically.
(Note that I concocted the URL monitoring example to make this more concrete and because what I actually have in mind is perhaps too weird and distracting -- this question is strictly about how to let humans and programs both modify the same state file.)
I'd use a database since that's basically what you're going to have to build to achieve what you want. Why re-invent the wheel?
If a full-blown DBMS is too much of a load, separate the files into two and synchronize them periodically. Whether the URL is reachable doesn't sound like something the user would be changing, so should not be editable by them.
During the synchronize process (which would have to lock out the monitor and the user although it could be a sub-function of the monitor), remove entries in the monitor file that aren't in the user full. Also, add to the monitor file those that have been added to the user file (and start monitoring them).
But, I'd go the database method with a special front-end for the user, since you can get relatively good light-weight databases nowadays.
Use a sensible version control system!
(Git would work well here).
That said, the nature of the problem implies that a real database would be best - and they will generally have either database-level, table-level, or row-level locking - but then put any scripts you need into version control.
I would go with option 3. In fact, I would have the program read the human-edited input file, and append the results of each query to a log file. In this way, you can also analyse the reachability of sites over time. You can also have the program maintain a file that indicates the current reachability state of each site in the input file, as a snapshot of the current state.
One other option is using two files, one for automated access and one for manual. You'd need a way in the user file to indicate modifications or deletions but you'd have similar problems in some of the other solutions as well.

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