What to do if $TMPDIR runs full?

[Ole Tange]

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?40733 was caused by $TMPDIR
running full.

When that happens the running program cannot communicate errors (as
STDERR is also saved to $TMPDIR and thus also fails).

The essence is that the user does not get a failure message: He will
have to check $? to see if there were any failures.

Disk full is not the only situation where this could happen: If a file
system has a file size limit this could also cause STDOUT/STDERR to be
truncated.

Maybe it would be possible to append a byte to the tmp files before
printing them. If ftell stays the same then the append did not work
and a warning should be written. If it worked, seek back 1 byte and
truncate. This, however, might slow down printing of a job, and seems
like a lot of checking to do for each and every job for the off chance
that $TMPDIR is full.

Do you have ideas for this?


/Ole