[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[terry-...@glaver.org]

On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 6:43:21 PM UTC-4, Dave Froble wrote:
> Unless you're trying to read the file while it's still open. That doesn't work.

That's kind of the whole point of 'tail -f' 8-}

I suspect all of the pieces are there, but nobody has put them together in
a single utility. For example, $ BACKUP/IGNORE=INTERLOCK doesn't care
if files are open or not. Years ago, I taught VMS C-Kermit about all of the
various permutations of RMS file structure, including a few well-known
cases of intentionally using undefined file types (True BASIC was one of
the offenders). It had to convert every possible file type to either canonical
ASCII, fixed-block binary, or a special format called "labeled"* (which was
invented by fdc and myself just to deal with VMS's myriad file types). The
only issue would seem to be that the tail program won't see a change in
EOF on slowly-growing files until the creating process either has a buffer
flush or closes the file, so the output might be bursty. But that's true on
Unix as well.

* Our test for this was to send a multi-key indexed file with RMS journaling
from VMS to TOPS-20 to a PC to IBM 370 VM/CMS and back to VMS and
having it arrive intact, complete with journal info.