Re: fpurge on z/OS

[Chet Ramey]

Bruno Haible wrote:

> Actually, the only places where bash-4.0 calls fpurge is directly after fflush
> on the same stream, and only on output streams:
> 
>   fflush (stdout);
>   fpurge (stdout);
> 
> Does someone understand the purpose of this code? IMO fpurge is a nop,
> right after fflush (assuming that fflush succeeded).

That's a dangerous assumption.  You can't always assume that fflush will
succeed.  And when it fails, newer versions of glibc leave data in the
stdio buffer.  Now, the assumption is that when fflush fails, it fails
due to some problem with the underlying file descriptor, and, further,
that that file descriptor will never change or repair itself.  Under
those conditions, it's ok for stdio/fflush to leave the data.

However, bash will change the file descriptor underlying a stdio buffer
when it performs redirection.  In that case, subsequent writes will
succeed, and those writes will include the data left by the previous
failed fflush.

When bash changes file descriptors, it needs to make sure that the
stdio buffers are empty.  I chose to use fflush for this purpose
(reluctantly), even though it's less than completely portable.  There
aren't any good portable solutions for the issue.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer

Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/