Re: Atomic file creation

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> vlc a écrit :
>
> > On Jan 4, 4:52 pm, Jean-Pierre Rosen <ro...@adalog.fr> wrote:
> >> Maybe because temporary files have no names ;-)
>
> >> Kidding appart, in the old time when people still knew how to write
> >> operating systems, the notion of temporary file was supported by the OS,
> >> and those files had really no name (as opposed to a junk name in /var/tmp).
>
> > Well, they have names, are stored in in /tmp/ and still exist after
> > the call of Ada.Text_IO.Close in line 5. I actually checked this :-)
>
> I presume you are using some elementary OS like Unix, that fakes
> temporary files short of having true ones... But the implementation is
> free to behave as if they were true temporary files. This protects your
> portability (to VMS for example, sigh of nostalgia...)

http://www.circa.ufl.edu/handouts/vms/tempfile.html

suggests that (1) not all users of VMS know about nameless temporary
files and (2) VMS does allow one to create named temporary files.

Also I am wondering how VMS allows programs to communicate by means of
nameless temporary files (e.g. program A writes a large amount of data
in a new file and tells program B to process it and then delete the
file).  Are the file names replaced with some kind of handle?

PS. VMS may be "non-elementary" but it is proprietary, ergo they have
something to hide, ergo I don't want it on *my* computer :)

--
Ludovic Brenta.