Subject: Re: Newbie SUP question
To: None <current-users@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: Holger Veit <Holger.Veit@gmd.de>
List: current-users
Date: 05/31/1994 17:27:45
> This would be great except for one minor problems.  The "when" files contain
> time_t's that are endian dependant.  I ran into this when tarring home a 
> src tree from a Sparc to my PC at home.  You should have seen the conniptions
> sup had when it tried to fetch all the changes since May 17, 2014 or some
> such.  Odd bit is it still deleted deleted files...but didn't fetch any
> new ones or changes.
> 
> If you "fix" the when files to the proper endianness, then things work
> properly.  This made me think that it would be nice if dd had a swap word or
> swap long word or similar options so this fixing could easily be done in a 
> shell script.  I couldn't find any shell util that did this and had to write
> a C program to fix it...

Can someone explain me why the 'when' file is binary at all? Looks as if
the CMU developers did too much optimization of file sizes. Writing the
# of secs since 1980 as an ASCII number may be 10 bytes compared to 4, 
but can be read with atol as easily and would avoid the endian hassle
for that problem.

-- 
         Dr. Holger Veit                   | INTERNET: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
|  |   / GMD-SET German National Research  | Phone: (+49) 2241 14 2448
|__|  /  Center for Computer Science       | Fax:   (+49) 2241 14 2342
|  | /   Schloss Birlinghoven              | Had a nightmare yesterday:
|  |/    53754 St. Augustin, Germany       | My system started up with
                                           | ... Booting vmunix.el ...

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