[Info-vax] Container files are set to grow in importance on the IT road ahead

[hb]

On 02/04/2016 03:40 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 2/4/16 7:54 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Info-vax [mailto:info-vax-bounces at info-vax.com] On Behalf Of hb
> 
>>> Hard links do not point from one disk to another. So something else was
>>> used by GNV.
> 
>> Well, there must be a hard or soft link of some sort because after the
>> fact,
>> I did a dir... on all the non-system disk GNV sub directories and a
>> number
>> of system dir's showed up. Hence, the original delete/tree cmd continued
>> deleting on the system disk.
> 
> It's possible that the POSIX root business and related mount points are
> what you tripped over.  If you figure out how those things work, please
> explain them to me :-).  I don't know if "SET NOROOT" or "SET ROOT NL:"
> might've prevented the disaster, but they'd be worth a try.  Or umnt on
> whatever mount points were aimed at your system disk, if any.
> 

It's all open source so it is easy to understand :-) I know nothing
about these mount points and mnt/umnt. I would expect mnt to mount any
VMS directory into the POSIX file system tree. The output of mnt seems
to support this:
bash-4.3$ mnt
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]usr.DIR;1 on /usr
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]man.dir;1 on /man
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]lib.DIR;1 on /lib
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]include.dir;1 on /include
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]etc.dir;1 on /etc
DISK$ODS5_1:[VMS$COMMON.gnv]bin.DIR;1 on /bin
bash-4.3$
So I can think of an environment where the POSIX root is in a
sub-directory of the installed GNV kit - on a non-system disk, and a
(default/customized?) mount point under the root mounts a directory from
the system disk. I didn't try but it is quite possible that a VMS DIR
and/or DELETE will follow the mount points (which in the SHOW ROOT
directory look like directories - as far as I can see) from the
non-system disk to the system disk.

I really would like to know how the directory structure was, before it
was deleted. And I still think that DELETE/TREE is innocent, here, as a
"normal" DELETE with "..." would have done the same damage.