[Coco] Using that 16/32/64 MB RamDrive.

[Theodore Evans (Alex)]

On Feb 7, 2004, at 1:01 PM, William Astle wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Gene Heskett wrote:
>
>> As a matter of fact, I got rather dissappointed in other OS's because
>> I couldn't do that, not with amigaos, nor with linux, although I
>> haven't really tried that hard or recently in linux.  But, time goes
>> only forward.
>
> You have, of course, investigated the "tail" command? Should work on 
> just
> about any unix variant.

Different variants of Unix provide varying levels of file sharing.  On 
some variants including early versions of Linux do not permit you to 
read a file which is open for writing by another process.  I believe 
that this is permitted in current versions of Linux.  Even in those 
versions which do permit this will give you different results from 
OS-9.  In OS-9 if you attempt to read past the end of a file which is 
currently being written by another process the reading process will 
block until the file has been written to that point, or the writing 
process closes the file.  In Unix (assuming that you can open the file 
for reading in the first place) it will react as if the end of the file 
is at the point where it has been lat written to.  Some of us (myself, 
Gene, and perhaps others) miss the OS-9 manner of handling this.  The 
"tail" command is of no help in this.