On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, iqbal wrote:
> Well I think it should, cause wouldn't it be useful to have it the
> primary key, as the first part, i.e shaun (in example below), since else
> you could get multiple entries, with the same email addresses.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you are requesting. Given
input of
shaun:shaun
shaun:anotherone
there are 3 things a DBM builder could do:
(1) Ignore the first line;
(2) Ignore the second line;
(3) Give an error message and refuse to process the file.
dbmbuild does (1); from Nigel's message it sounds as though some others
do (2), and if you search the file with lsearch you will get (2).
One of the reasons for not doing (3) is that it would slow down the
building process and that might be significant for very large files. For
every new key it is about to create it would have to do a read on the
file to check that it wasn't there alread - or it would have to keep a
list of keys in memory or in some other kind of file. All of which is
tedious to implement...
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
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