TCL Opaque Handle C lib - c

I am confused with the following code from tcl wiki 1089,
#define TEMPBUFSIZE 256 /* usually enough space! */
char buf[[TEMPBUFSIZE]];
I was curious and I tried to compile the above syntax in gcc & armcc, both fails. I was looking to understand how tcl handle to file pointer mechanism works to solve the chaos on data logging by multiple jobs running in a same folder [log files unique to jobs].
I have multiple tcl scripts running in parallel as LSF Jobs each using a log file.
For example,
Job1 -> log1.txt
Job2 -> log2.txt
(file write in both case is "intermittent" over the entire job execution)
Some of the text which I expect to be part of log1.txt is written to log2.txt and vice versa randomly. I have tried with "fconfigure $fp -buffering none", the behaviour still persists. One important note, all the LSF jobs are submitted from the same folder and if I submit the jobs from individual folder, the log files dont have text write from other job. I would like the jobs to be executed from same folder to reduce space consumption from repeating the resource in different folder.
Question1:
Can anyone advice me how the tcl "handles" is interpreted to a pointer to the memory allocated for the log file? I have mentioned intermitent because of the following, "Tcl maps this string internally to an open file pointer when it is time for the interpreter to do some file I/O against that particular file - wiki 1089"
Question2:
Is there a possiblity that two different "open" can end up having same "file"?

Somewhere along the line, the code has been mangled; it looks like it happened when I converted the syntax from one type of highlighting scheme to another in 2011. Oops! My original content used:
char buf[TEMPBUFSIZE];
and that's what you should use. (I've updated the wiki page to fix this.)

Related

identifying data file type

I have a huge 1.9 GB data file without extension I need to open and get some data from, the problem is this data file is extension-less and I need to know what extension it should be and what software I can open it with to view the data in a table.
here is the picture :
Its only 2 lines file, I already tried csv on excel but it did not work, any help ?
I have never use it but you could try this:
http://mark0.net/soft-tridnet-e.html
explained here:
http://www.labnol.org/software/unknown-file-extensions/20568/
The third "column" of that line looks 99% chance to be from php's print_r function (with newlines imploded to be able to stored on a single line).
There may not be a "format" or program to open it with if its just some app's custom debug/output log.
A quick google found a few programs to split large files into smaller units. THat may make it easier to load into something (may or may not be n++) for reading.
It shouldnt be too hard to mash out a script to read the lines and reconstitute the session "array" into a more readable format (read: vertical, not inline), but it would to be a one-off custom job, since noone other than the holder of your file would have a use for it.

Script for modifying behavior of running C program

I have a situation where I submitted jobs that have been running for five days but due to a bug introduced all the work could be lost. I made a 'system' call to compress the data file and then remove the original uncompressed file that could be as big as 4G. So I have this in the C code
strcpy(command,"data"); ////I should added a forward slash here "data/"
sprintf(command,"%scompress -c -i %s -o %s",command,name,out_name);
system(command);
remove(name); /////This is the problem
The bug is in the sprintf line, in which what I wanted to do was to call a program in data/compress, but due to the missing '/' the system command fails. And thus the data produced is not compressed AND then immediately the original file is DELETED leaving me with nothing! If it was compressed it would have been OK.
There are currently five running jobs in such a state. I need to divert this behavior somehow so that I don't lose five days work. I am thinking to create a fake script named 'datacompress' in the current directory to change the behavior of the running program. Can I do this or are there better options, if at all?
You can make datacompress a symbolic link to data/compress. Oops, this won't work unless the process's $PATH includes ..
Another option: remove the user's write permission to the directory containing name. This will cause the remove() function to fail.
If your system has Access Control Lists, remove the process's delete permission on the uncompressed file.
While you're trying to come up with a solution, you can suspend the process with:
kill -STOP <pid>
Create hard links (not symbolic links) to the data files:
ln datafile datafile.bkp
When the program removes the original datafile, the file's contents will remain under the .bkp filename.
And then fix the program to check error status of important things like the compress command.

Unknown Master List .dat file, issues retrieving information

I come to you completely stumped. I do some side work for a company that uses an old DOS based program to input and retrieve data. This is a legacy piece of software, and they have since moved to either QuickBooks or Outlook for all of their address or billing related needs. However there have been some changes made, and they work with this database fairly regularly. Since the computer that this software is on, is running XP (and none of the other computers in the office can run it) they're looking to phase this software out for when the computer inevitably explodes.
TLDR; I have an old .csv file (roughly two years) that has a good chunk of information on it, but again it's two years old. I have another file called ml.dat (I'm assuming masterlist.dat) that's in the same folder as this legacy software. I open it with notepad and excel and am presented with information like this:
S;Û).;PÃS;*p(â'a,µ,
The above chunk of text is recognized much less within notepad or excel. It's a lot more of the unrecognized squares.
Some of the information is actually readable however. I can for example read the occasional town name, or person's name but I'm unable to get all of the information since there's a lot missing. Perhaps the data isn't in unicode or something? I have no idea. Any suggestions? I'm ultimately trying to take this information and toss it into either quickbooks or outlook.
Please help!
Thanks
Edit: I'm guessing the file might be encrypted since .dat's are usually clear text? Any thoughts?
.DAT files can be anything, they are usually just application data. Since there is readable text, then it is very unlikely that this file is encrypted. Instead you are seeing ASCII representations of the bytes of other content. http://www.asciitable.com/ Assuming single byte values, the number 77 might appear in the file somewhere as M.
Your options:
Search for some utility to load and translate the dat file for that application.
Set up an appropriate dos emulator so you can run this application on another box, or even a virtual machine running freedos or something.
Figure out the file format and then write a program to translate the data.
For #3, you can attach a debugger to the application to trace how the file is read and written. Alternatively you can try to figure out record boundaries (if all the records are the same size, then things are a little bit easier.) Then you can use known values to try to find field boundaries. If you can find (or reverse compile) the source code, then that could also give you insight into the file format.
1 is your best bet, and #2 will buy you some time so that you don't need that original machine anymore. #3 would likely be something to outsource.
If you can find the source or file format, then you just recreate whatever data structure was dumped to the file and read the file into it.
To find which exe opens it, you can do something like:
for %f in (*.exe) do find "ml.dat" %f -c
Assuming the original application was written in C then there would be code something like this to read the first record from the file:
struct SecretData
{
int first;
double money;
char city[10];
};
FILE* input;
struct SecretData secretdata;
input = fopen("ml.dat", "rb");
fread(&data, sizeof(data), 1, input);
fclose(input);
(The file would have been written with fwrite.) Basically you need to figure out the innards of the SecretData structure to be able to read the file.
There likely wasn't a separate utility used to make the file, dumping data and reading it back from a file is relatively easy in most languages.

permission denied for rename function in C on windows

I have an application developed in C. This application is supported across multiple platforms. There is one functionality where we are transferring files via file transfer protocol to different machine or to any other directory on local machine. I want to include a functionality where I can transfer the file with some temporary name and once the transfer is complete, I want to rename the file with the correct name (the actual file name).
I tried using simple rename() function. It works fine in Unix and Linux machines. But it does not work on Windows. It is giving me an error code of 13(Permission denied error).
First thing, I checked in msdn to know the functionality of rename if I have to grant some permissions to the file etc.
I granted full permissions to the file (lets say it is 777).
I read in few other posts that I should close the file descriptor before renaming the file. I did that too. It still gives the same error.
Few other posts mentioned about the owner of the file and that of the application. The application will run as a SYSTEM user. (But this should not affect the behavior, because I tried the same rename function in my application as follows:
This works fine from my application:
rename("C:/abc/aaa.txt","C:/abc/zzz.txt");
but
rename(My_path,"C:/abc/zzz.txt");
doesn't work, where My_path when printed displays C:/abc/test.txt.
How can I rename a file? I need it to work on multiple platforms.
Are there any other things I should be trying to make it work.?
I had this same problem, but the issue was slightly different. If I did the following sequence of function calls, I got "Permission Denied" when calling the rename function.
fopen
fwrite
rename
fclose
The solution was to close the file first, before doing the rename.
fopen
fwrite
fclose
rename
If
rename("C:/abc/aaa.txt","C:/abc/zzz.txt");
works but
rename(My_path,"C:/abc/zzz.txt");
does not, in the exact same spot in the program (i.e. replacing one line with another and making no changes), then there might be something wrong with the variable My_path. What is the type of this variable? If it is a char array (since this is C), is it terminated appropriately? And is it exactly equal to "C:/abc/aaa.txt"?
(I wish I could post this as a comment/clarification rather than as an answer but my rep isn't good enough :( )

Following multiple log files efficiently

I'm intending to create a programme that can permanently follow a large dynamic set of log files to copy their entries over to a database for easier near-realtime statistics. The log files are written by diverse daemons and applications, but the format of them is known so they can be parsed. Some of the daemons write logs into one file per day, like Apache's cronolog that creates files like access.20100928. Those files appear with each new day and may disappear when they're gzipped away the next day.
The target platform is an Ubuntu Server, 64 bit.
What would be the best approach to efficiently reading those log files?
I could think of scripting languages like PHP that either open the files theirselves and read new data or use system tools like tail -f to follow the logs, or other runtimes like Mono. Bash shell scripts probably aren't so well suited for parsing the log lines and inserting them to a database server (MySQL), not to mention an easy configuration of my app.
If my programme will read the log files, I'd think it should stat() the file once in a second or so to get its size and open the file when it's grown. After reading the file (which should hopefully only return complete lines) it could call tell() to get the current position and next time directly seek() to the saved position to continue reading. (These are C function names, but actually I wouldn't want to do that in C. And Mono/.NET or PHP offer similar functions as well.)
Is that constant stat()ing of the files and subsequent opening and closing a problem? How would tail -f do that? Can I keep the files open and be notified about new data with something like select()? Or does it always return at the end of the file?
In case I'm blocked in some kind of select() or external tail, I'd need to interrupt that every 1, 2 minutes to scan for new or deleted files that shall (no longer) be followed. Resuming with tail -f then is probably not very reliable. That should work better with my own saved file positions.
Could I use some kind of inotify (file system notification) for that?
If you want to know how tail -f works, why not look at the source? In a nutshell, you don't need to periodically interrupt or constantly stat() to scan for changes to files or directories. That's what inotify does.

Resources