How to deal with a warning message about my Audit file being too large

How to deal with a warning message about my Audit file being too large

When starting Spotfire S+ the following warning message is displayed

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  Audit file is 1278494 characters long.
        Run shell command "Splus TRUNC_AUDIT" to truncate it. in: setAudit()
=====

However, when I run Splus TRUNC_AUDIT, I get:

$ Splus TRUNC_AUDIT
Can not find audit file or it did not have read permission

  All commands that issuee in Spotfire S+ for Unix/Linux are recorded in '.Audit' files located in your .Data directories.  

The size of the .Audit file will eventually reach its limit, as dictated by the 'options(audit.file)' command.  When the file reaches this limit, it will return a warning similar to

        Audit file is 774326 characters long

To reduce the size of your .Audit file, you can either delete it altogether, or run the Spotfire S+ 'TRUNC_AUDIT' utility.  

This utility removes the oldest part of the file, and is run from the Unix prompt by typing:

Splus TRUNC_AUDIT 0

Details from the online help file for TRUNC_AUDIT below:

--------------------------------

                            Truncate the Audit File

DESCRIPTION:

   A utility that reduces the size of the audit file by removing the oldest part of the audit. It is run from the UNIX

prompt.
    
USAGE:

   Splus TRUNC_AUDIT  [size]
    
OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS:

   size
          desired maximum size (in number of characters) of the resulting audit file. The default is 100000.

SIDE EFFECTS:

   part or all of the audit file is deleted.

WARNING:
   The TRUNC_AUDIT utility cannot be run while Spotfire S+ is running, since S+ normally has the audit file open for writing.

DETAILS:

   The audit file is an ASCII file named .Audit in the working directory, to which the commands that you type to S+ are added. Its pathname is returned by the function audit.file.   The TRUNC_AUDIT utility attempts to preserve the most recent size characters of the audit file. It does so by finding the first S+ expression in the audit file that is within size characters of the end of file.   If there is a problem in truncating the audit file, a message is produced and the audit file is not changed. If you get a warning, it may be an indication that the audit file has been corrupted.

   Whenever you exit S+, it checks the size of the audit file against the audit.size limit. If it is over the limit, a message is printed advising you to use the TRUNC_AUDIT utility. If your audit file contains important information, do not run TRUNC_AUDIT, but instead increase the audit.size option. Executing options(audit.size = n) will cause S+ to use n as the audit file size limit.

   To disable the addition of commands to the .Audit file, you can use the UNIX command chmod -w .Data/.Audit in the directory containing the .Data directory. This is useful, for example, when performing simulations. Auditing can be re-enabled with, for instance: chmod +w .Data/.Audit

SEE ALSO:
    
   audit.file , options , history , AUDIT.

EXAMPLES:

   Splus TRUNC_AUDIT 0   # empty the audit file

--------------------

If you run the command:

Splus TRUNC_AUDIT

and get:

$ Splus TRUNC_AUDIT
Can not find audit file or it did not have read permission

it means that the TRUNC_AUDIT utility can not find the .Audit file.  We have seen this problem before, and have determined that it is not version specific or a permissions issue.  

The solution/workaround is to cd to the parent directory of the .Audit file and run Splus TRUNC_AUDIT from there.  The parent directory is the working directory, which is specified when you launch Spotfire S+ in the line that starts with 'Working data will be in..."

Be sure to have Spotfire S+ closed before running the 'Splus TRUNC_AUDIT' command.