Dear Nathan, dear Gap Forum,

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Nathan Dunfield wrote:

Dear Gap Forum,

Problem: When DirectoryTemporary is called, more than 5000 calls to
Process with the output stream being a text stream results in an
error. (The error always occurs on exactly the 5000th call).

Version/Platform: GAP4, Version: 4r1 of 26-Jul-1999, on linux and solaris.

I recall a similar problem with TmpName() in Gap 3.4.4 on my Linux
machine (and under OS/2 with emx). AFAIK, this is not a problem with Gap
but the operating system. Linux for example limits the number of temp
names a process can create (might be 5000, I am not sure about that). I
usually would overcome this problem with a wrapper function for
TempName/DirectoryTemporary. I suppose everybody who uses Gap to check
large amounts of objects under Unix and needs C-functions (e.g., GRAPE
with nauty) has this problem at some time.

I would be interested to know how others solve this.
Regards,

Frank Fiedler
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Delaware                                 fiedler@math.udel.edu
Newark, DE 19716                           http://www.math.udel.edu/~fiedler