glimpse_partitions not found

[Charles Hall <Charles.Hall@sas.com>]

I have just had a very curious experience with Glimpse, and I thought I'd share it in case it is helpful to someone else...

I have been having consistent troubles running 'wgreindex' in my nightly cron job on Linux. It "appears" to work but does not create a ".glimpse_partitions" file. This used to work, so I at first suspected the files had gotten too large or something.

Then I realized that it AWLAYS worked when I ran it by hand the next day, and it ALWAYS failed via the cron job. After several experiments I found that changing the shell in my cron job to 'bash' made it work!

I can only imagine that one of the Glimpse programs makes use of a shell command that the default Bourne shell ('sh') doesn't support. Or that this computer's Bourne shell set-up is just goofy.

I tried setting certain environment variables explicitly, and also grep'ing the source code for 'exec' or 'system' calls (there are lots), but I can't narrow it down.

At any rate, it's a quick fix to try if you have trouble generating the '.glimpse_partitions' file.

Trial and error.... my secret weapon. 

Charles Hall
Raleigh, NC