Re: who(1) exit status

[Shal-Linux-Ind]

On 6/23/08, Andreas Schwab <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > According to Shal-Linux-Ind on 6/23/2008 4:05 AM:
> > | Hi,
> > |
> > | who(1) exit status is always 0.
> > |
> > | $ who --v
> > | who (coreutils) 5.2.1
> >
> > Thanks for the report.  Consider upgrading - that is several years old,
> > and the latest stable version is 6.12.  But I have confirmed that the
> > issue still exists in git beyond 6.12:
> >
> > $ who /nosuch/file; echo $?
> > 0
>
>
> See the comment in read_utmp:
>
>   /* Ignore the return value for now.
>      Solaris' utmpname returns 1 upon success -- which is contrary
>      to what the GNU libc version does.  In addition, older GNU libc
>      versions are actually void.   */
>   UTMP_NAME_FUNCTION (file);
>
> When using the utmpname/setutent/getutmp family of functions there
> really is no way to check for errors reading the file, since utmpname
> does not actually try to open it, and setutent has no return value.
>
> **utmpname() returns integer, only when failure on allocating memory its
> returning -1, its best to include the file existance checking before memory
> allocation, and returning -1 if no such file exists.
>
> **Need to check the compitibilty breaking, I think there is no
> compitibility breaking.
>
>  **Thanks,Halesh
>
> Andreas.
>
>
> --
> Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
> SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
> PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
> "And now for something completely different."
>