[Info-vax] DCL enhancements

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/25/21 11:35 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2021-01-25 17:25:09 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:
> 
>> In article <rumtou$mrk$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman 
>> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:

>>> maybe fix the inexplicable SYS$SCRATCH default of SYS$LOGIN,
>>
>> Presumably, SYS$LOGIN is the only directory which can be counted on 
>> to  exist.
> 
> I'd wager it was a good-enough shortcut during development, rather than 
> actually implementing viable and automatically-managed temporary storage.

It's probably a better default than dumping everything in a
world-writable /tmp, which I'm pretty sure was the contemporary solution
on other systems at the time VMS made SYS$LOGIN the default. But yes, it
would be nice if 40 years on someone had gotten around to secure,
configurable, auto-purging scratch space that didn't drop things in the
user's home directory.