[Info-vax] DCL enhancements

[Tad Winters]

On 1/25/2021 12:27 PM, Craig A. Berry via Info-vax wrote:
>

  <<snip>>

> 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$LOGIN the default. But yes, it
> would be nice if 40 years on someone had gotten around to secure,
> configurable, auto-purging scratch space that didn't drop things in the
> user's home directory.
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I'm reminded how I handled SYS$SCRATCH for one server of a former employer:
     The server was configured for maximum of a few hundred processes.
     The last of several disks was largely unused. (Call it LAST$DISK)

In SYLOGIN.COM, I grabbed the process index and formatted a 4-digit
number as a string.  I check on LAST$DISK:[SCRATCH] for a directory
named with that string and created it, if it didn't exist.  I set it
with WORLD:RWE.  I then searched for anything in that directory and if
anything was found, it was deleted.  I then defined SYS$SCRATCH to point
at that directory.  I recognized this didn't provide any security, but
because the disk had lots of free space, it meant sorts and file
conversions had the necessary space, and cleanup would naturally occur
at the same rate as temporary files were left behind.  It certainly
wouldn't work for everyone, but the users were not wise to it, and it
was the only user accessible disk without disk quotas.  (I never saw it
abused.)