Gavin writes:

>Symbolic links are useful in lots of "pure MPE" places that people don't
>usually think of using them because they are perceived as a "Posix"
>feature.

Here's one example. We have several programs that write to log files we
keep for statistical purposes. The normally, the log files are switched
daily, but the system runs 24 hours/day. So rather than having the
programs calculate the name of a log file, or try to read it out of a
configuration file, every program that wants to log opens, say,
SRCHLOG.PUB. SRCHLOG.PUB is a link to the current log file, whatever its
name.

Most of the time, a job runs at midnight which creates a new log file,
then (while holding appropriate locks) does a PURGELINK SRCHLOG.PUB,
followed by a NEWLINK SRCHLOG.PUB,<new log file name>. When we want to do
something special with the log data, the symbolic link makes it easy for
us to control which log files get written, without every changing the
program or job stream/command file.

-- Bruce


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