Jeff Vance writes:
>    What is more important to you and your customers (not mutually exclusive
>    choices):
>
> a) guarantee 100% that all existing programs and scripts that process
>    LISTF,2 output will work correctly on all files <= 4 Gbytes.
>    However, for files larger than 4GB, these programs and scripts may
>    require modification.

Yes.  Assuming that you mean you get something like "**********" in the EOF
and LIMIT columns for large files.

If this isn't what you mean, please give some sample output for a large file.

> b) have LISTF,2 use the same output format for 1TB files as it does for
>    smaller files even if this breaks some existing applications working on
>    less than 4GB files.  That is, force applications to change as soon as
>    large files become supported even if there are no large files on the
>    system.

No!

Don't you dare change the LISTF,2 output format.  I have enough things to
worry about after doing an OS update, and I don't want to have to worry about
tracking down all references to LISTF,2.

As long as I'm not currently using large files, I don't want to have to change
anything.

> c) guarantee that any existing program/script that tries to process LISTF,2
>    output on files larger than 4GB will return accurate results.  For
>    instance if this "old" program is adding up the EOF field it will get an
>    addition error or abort or ??? when it encounters a large file.  That is,
>    you don't want this program to silently "skip" (or add the wrong units of
>    measure for) this large file when computing the total EOF across the
>    fileset.

I'm confused as to how this differs from a) above.

But having old LISTF,2 programs abort when they encounter a large file works
for me.  I want to be assured all computed data is valid, and if it isn't,
an abort (due to a math error trying to process non-numeric data) will let
me know this program needs to be fixed (instead of silently generating bogus
data).
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
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"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)