Re: autoconf test ': >emtpy' problem under Ultrix

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar 20, 2001, Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:

>>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:

Alexandre> IIRC, there are filesystems that don't support zero-sized
Alexandre> files.

> ISTR that for a time we believed AIX was one such FS, but it has never
> been demonstrated.  What platform are you thinking about?

Hmm...  Well, I recall things such as:

C> copy con foo.txt
^Z

failing on MS-DOS.  But it may be that it's not a problem in the FS,
but in copy.  Anyway, automake uses `echo timestamp > file', instead
of touch, and I've always thought the reason was to avoid having an
empty file.  OTOH, I've abused emoticons such as `: >' in the Samba
Makefiles, and I don't recall anybody having reported problems with
it.  Maybe this is just portability myth...

I wouldn't mind having the testsuite failing in case an empty file
can't be created, but I'd be very concerned if autoconf or configure
scripts generated by it depended on this ability, for now.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  address@hidden, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
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