On Thu, 12 Feb 1998, Bruce Bowler <bbowler@???> wrote:
>
> exicyclog should pad the number so that the ls -l order of the logs is
> "natural" (ie. .01, .02, .03, not .1,.10,.11,.12).
On Fri 13 Feb 1998 [enough said, eh?], Philip Hazel <ph10@???> wrote:
>
> Good Idea.
As Philip is just about to impose this on our systems, I was reminded me of
this exchange, and what I didn't get round to saying at the time.
Although it's a venerable Unix tradition, the preserving of old versions of
log files by renaming thing -> thing.0 -> thing.1 -> ... every day/week/month
has some distinct disadvantages. One is that the renaming causes all the
ic_ctime time stamps to be updated, forcing everything in the cycle into the
next incremental dump. A naming scheme based on absolute time stamps avoids this.
As for the merits of the leading zeros, the arguments aren't all on one side.
A script that computes which log file to look at is likely to find the %d format
more convenient to generate than the %02d one.
Chris Thompson Cambridge University Computing Service,
Email: cet1@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
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