From:	sandmann AT clio DOT rice DOT edu (Charles Sandmann)
Message-Id:	<9803131547.AA13959@clio.rice.edu>
Subject:	Re: Temporary files considered unsafe
To:	Vik DOT Heyndrickx AT rug DOT ac DOT be (Vik Heyndrickx)
Date:	Fri, 13 Mar 1998 09:47:36 -0600 (CST)
Cc:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To:	<3508E9EA.37D9@rug.ac.be> from "Vik Heyndrickx" at Mar 13, 98 09:10:18 am

> There is one possibility of occurance that is much higher than 1/M:
> When a program is terminated and started again, e.g. from a batch or
> script file, all four values you gave may be the same (with the least
> possibility for the last one), of course yielding the same PID value.
> This chance of occurance is important enough to be avoided.

If the program takes less than 1/18th of a second to run, creates some
temporary file or some other object with it's PID which needs to 
survive it's lifetime and communicate that information to something
outside it's environement, and does useful work - I think that's
pathalogical in the 1 in a million range.

After all, this is DOS you are building this stuff on.  If you want
reliability you would have chosen a real operating system...

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