[2479] in Athena Bugs
purge
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Tue Jun 27 19:45:28 1989
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 89 19:45:14 -0400
From: Jonathan I. Kamens <jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: qjb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: bugs[2478]
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Off the top of my head, I'd say that you were trying to purge a
whole lot of files, and purge ran out of memory trying to store the
info it needed for all of them.
You're right, a more informative error message would have been
helpful. The error message you got is printed when a call to a
particular library function used by lsdel, expunge, purge and undelete
fails for some reason; the reason there is no more specific error
message is that I hesitate to make library functions print out error
messages, and I was also hesitant to burden the code with the
complications that would be required in order to pass an error string
back to the calling function.
If you have the problem again, please let me know, and I'll try to
come up with a way to improve the error messages. Perhaps I'll pass
the program name into the library function so that the library
function can print out an error if it runs out of memory.... don't you
just love breaking abstraction barriers?
jik
