mirror of https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages
3d335319e7
As reported by Nadav Har'El in https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197961 The write(2) manual page has this paragraph: "On success, the number of bytes written is returned (zero indicates nothing was written). It is not an error if this number is smaller than the number of bytes requested; this may happen for example because the disk device was filled. See also NOTES." I find a few problems with this paragraph: 1. It's not clear what "See also NOTES." refers to (does it refer to anything?). What in the NOTES is relevant here? 2. The paragraph seems to suggest that write(2) of a non-empty buffer may sometimes return even 0 in case of an error like the device being filled. I think this is wrong - if there was an error after already writing some number of bytes, this non-zero number is returned. But if there's an error before writing any bytes, -1 will be returned (and the error reason in errno) - 0 will not be returned unless the given count is 0 (that case is explained in the following paragraph). 3. The paragraph doesn't explain what a user should do after a short write (i.e., write(2) returning less than count). How would the user know why there was an error, or if there even was one? I think users should be told what to do next because this information is part of how to use this API correctly. I think users should be told to retry the rest of the write (i.e., write(fd, buf+ret, count-ret) and this will either succeed in writing some more data if the error reason was solved, or the second write will return -1 and the error reason in errno. Reported-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@math.technion.ac.il> Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com> |
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README
This package contains Linux man pages for sections 1 through 8. Some more information is given in the 'man-pages-x.y.Announce' file. Installing and uninstalling =========================== "make install" will copy these man pages to /usr/share/man/man[1-8]. To install to a path different from /usr, use "make install prefix=/install/path". "make remove" or "make uninstall" will remove any man page in this distribution from its destination. Use with caution, and remember to use "prefix" if desired, as with the "install" target. "make" or "make all" will perform "make uninstall" followed by "make install". Man page overlap and duplication ================================ Note that sometimes these pages are duplicates of pages also distributed in other packages. This has been reported about: man page also found in ------------------------------------- resolver.3 bind-utils, bind9utils resolv.conf.5 " passwd.5 shadow, passwd mailaddr.7 ? Copyrights ========== See the 'man-pages-x.y.Announce' file. Homepage ======== For much more about the Linux man-pages project, see http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/index.html.