From owner-freebsd-isp  Wed Jun  9 10:44: 4 1999
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Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 13:43:58 -0400
From: Mark Conway Wirt <mark@intrepid.net>
To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Forking Problem w/ Perl, FBSD 3.1
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I have a server running FBSD 3.1, and I have a cron job that -- in
addition to some other things -- creates directories if necessary and
chown's them.  A snippet of the code:

    if (!(-d $dir)) {
        print "Creating $dir\n";
        mkdir "$dir",0777;
        system("/var/qmail/bin/maildirmake $dir/Maildir");
        system("chown -R vpopmail.vchkpw $dir");

    }

In other words, if the directory does not exist, it forks a system
call to create it (and some sub-directories) and then forks a system
call to chown it.

The problem is that sometimes the chmod works, and sometimes it
doesn't.  As near as I can figure it, the system fork is sometimes
returning before the directories are created, and when that happens
the chmod fails because it's attempting to access files that have not
been "written to disk" yet.  I've added a sync:

        system("(/var/qmail/bin/maildirmake $dir/Maildir; sync)");

and that seems to help, but the following chmod still fails some time.

Anyone seen anything like this before?

TIA.

--Mark
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