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bug#11816: sort -o: error comes late if opening the outfile fails
From: |
Pádraig Brady |
Subject: |
bug#11816: sort -o: error comes late if opening the outfile fails |
Date: |
Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:11:08 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110816 Thunderbird/6.0 |
On 06/30/2012 12:53 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 06/29/2012 07:55 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> Also the in==out case, you'd like to check for write-ability too.
>>
>> Both cases could be handled I think with something like:
>>
>> if (access (outfile, W_OK) != 0 && errno != ENOENT)
>> error (...);
>
> Wouldn't it be better to actually open the output file,
> but not truncate it? We can then truncate it just before
> actually writing to the file. That would avoid a race
> condition or two.
>
> In the in==out case, we could tune this by opening
> the file just once, with O_RDWR. If the file is not
> a regular file, we might have to give up and open such
> a file twice, but that should be rare.
>
The race would be unlikely and
only fallback to the existing operation
of slower failure.
Though I suppose opening the file is a
more direct check and would also obviate the
need to check for writeability of the containing dir
in the case of a non existent file.
OK I'm leaning towards an early open so.
As for cleaning up an empty created file,
`sort` already has an exit_cleanup() function,
so we can unlink there.
I'm not sure it's worth tuning the in==out case TBH.
cheers,
Pádraig.