Re: coreutils 5.95 on IRIX 5.3

[Paul Eggert]

Georg Schwarz <address@hidden> writes:

> hmmm, whose fault is it?

Apparently your kernel or file system has a serious bug.  As your
private email to me demonstrated, if "empty" is an empty directory and
"d" is a directory, then the system call rename("d", "empty") does not
decrement the link count of ".", and this corrupts the file system.

What sort of file system are the files on?

I assume IRIX 5.3 has a 'rename' system call, and that 'rename' is not
emulated by lower-level calls?  You should be able to check this by
using "par -isSS mv -fT empty d".


Changing the subject slightly:

<https://support.sgi.com/content_request/8277/index.html> says
SGI last released IRIX 5.3 in May 1996 and stopped supporting it in
January 2002.  That same reference says that SGI has expired all IRIX
releases other than the current one, 6.5.  So there is no point in
your reporting this bug to SGI unless the bug also occurs in IRIX 6.5.

Are there old patch sets from SGI for IRIX 5.3 that you could apply to
your system?  Perhaps they might fix the problem.

Is it still important that new GNU utilities run on this old system,
or are you just trying to help out by using IRIX 5.3 as a porting
target to debug the coreutils installation procedure?  If the latter,
then I suspect it's not worth the trouble: we typically are worried
about porting only to systems that actively employ recent coreutils
apps in practical use.