How Amanda uses what restore program to use, a correction

In AmandaRestorePrograms I wrote, about what to do if Amanda didn't recognize properly recognize which sort of dump program it had used to back up a filesystem:

• put a 'restore' program (either a cover script or just a symlink to ufsrestore) somewhere in our $PATH when we do Amanda restores.

Allow me to correct myself: this doesn't actually work as I wrote it. (When I wrote the original article, we hadn't had to actually test this; we have since then.)

The problem is that Amanda does not actually search $PATH when it is executing the restore program (including when it is plain 'restore'); it simply executes the program directly by path (which is sensible, since it normally knows the exact path). When it tries to execute the default restore program it uses no path, and thus is actually trying to run './restore'.

(In Unix terms, Amanda uses execve() instead of execvp() or the like.)

So: you have to put your 'restore' program in the current directory (possibly in the directory that Amanda will restore to, if you've changed that inside amrecover). This does work, although it's slightly inconvenient.