stifling XWin.exe.stackdump

["Kenneth Nellis" <knellis at syntek-usa dot com>]

I write to share the solution to a problem I didn't know I had until 
I tripped over it this morning. For various reasons, I have not 
upgraded to the 6.8.99.901 versions of Xwindows. Each time I opened a 
new xterm window with startxwin.bat after the XWin.exe server was 
already running, I was generating a XWin.exe.stackdump file in the 
"My Documents" folder. This event was responsible for 2+ seconds burst 
of disk activity. By removing write access to the file (chmod -w), 
writing to this file is stifled, eliminating the burst of activity.

An interesting aside: Before removing write access to the file, I 
attempted to stifle the disk activity by redirecting it to the bit 
bucket:

$ ln -sf /dev/null XWin.exe.stackdump

What resulted, however, is that the sym-link was converted to a 
Windows shortcut and the file with the same name was created. So, 
in both the Cygwin and the Windows worlds, I add two entries with 
the exact same name.

Here's the before and after "ls" output:

Before:

$ ls -ld XWin.*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 knellis sweng 9 Sep 29 12:19 XWin.exe.stackdump -> /dev/null
$ 

After:

$ ls -ld XWin.*
-rwx------+ 1 knellis sweng 1249 Sep 29 12:21 XWin.exe.stackdump
-rwx------+ 1 knellis sweng 1249 Sep 29 12:21 XWin.exe.stackdump
$ 

For the curious, "cygcheck -svr" output is attached.

--Ken Nellis

Attachment: cygcheck.out.txt
Description: Text document

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