Our central mail machine runs various cron jobs as part of its work.Starting recently, every now and then a cron job (or a command run outof an alias) would randomly die with an error like:

sh: /cs/foo/adm/script: cannot execute

(Where /cs/foo is NFS mounted through the automounter, and the cronentry just runs that script.)

I am pretty sure that this is a gift from the Solaris 8 automounter.

Our central mail machine is pretty old

As peculiar as it sounds, I don't like the automatic mounting andunmounting of NFS filesystems. I don't have unreliable NFS fileserversand I don't like the various side effects of not having everythingmounted; pretty much the only thing it seems good for is making oursystems slower and more fragile.

However, one thing that the automounter is good for is maintaininga nice, organized list of NFS mounts in a format that can be easilydistributed around without problems, and even automatically gettingit right

I think that part of the issue with volatile is that it can beused for at least three different things:

1. stuff that can change behind the compiler's back (eg flags set ina signal handler), where mostly you need the compiler to not cachevalues loaded from volatile variables.
2. hardware registers, where reads and writes have side effects, soyou need the compiler to do all loads, even apparently pointlessones (as John Mashey and MIPS found out in the early ages ofoptimizing compilers being used on