C

CDE Process Manager

A GUI tool for viewing and managing system processes.

Character device file

A device file that calls for I/O operations based on the disk's smallest addressable unit, or sector. Each sector is 512 bytes in size. A character device is also referred to as a raw device.

Check script

Used to validate the rules file that is required by the custom JumpStart installation software to match a system to a profile.

Chunk

A quantity of information that is handled as a unit by the host and array.

Child process

New processes created by a parent process.

Class file

A text file that defines how to install the Solaris software on a system.

Client

Systems that rely on servers are called clients. In other words, a client is a system that uses remote services from a server.

Client/server

Used to describe the relationship between a server and its clients. See server and client.

Cluster

A cluster of patches (patch cluster), or a cluster of software packages (software cluster).

Concatenation

Used to combine two or more files to create one larger file. If partitions are concatenated, the addressing of the component blocks is done on the components sequentially, which means that data is written to the first available stripe until it is full, and then moves to the next available stripe.

Concatenated Stripe

A metadevice comprised of both concatenated and striped components.

Configuration group

On SPARC systems, software groups are grouped into five configuration groups to make the software installation process easier. During the installation process, you will be asked to install one of the five configuration groups. These five configuration groups are core system support, end-user support, developer system support, entire distribution, and entire distribution plus OEM system support.

Configuration server

A server that contains the JumpStart configuration files, used to install networked systems.

Controller

A device within the array that manages commands and data transfers from the host, delegates jobs to its processors, and maps the data locations in the array.

Core file

A point-in-time copy (snapshot) of the RAM allocated to a process. The copy is written to a more permanent medium, such as a hard disk. A core file is useful in analyzing why a particular program crashed.

A core file is also a disk copy of the address space of a process, at a certain point in time. This information identifies items, such as the task name, task owner, priority, and instruction queue in execution at the time the core file was created.

Crash dump

A disk copy of the physical memory of the computer at the time of a fatal system error.

crontab file

Consists of commands, one per line, that will be executed at regular intervals by the cron daemon.

Custom JumpStart

Provides a way to install groups of similar systems automatically and identically.

Cylinder

A stack of concentric tracks.

Cylinder groups

Each file system is divided into cylinder groups with a minimum default size of 16 cylinders per group.

Cylinder group blocks

A table in each cylinder group that describes the cylinder group.