What's the practical use of the error close() returns?

[Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda]

My practical answer:

I always check fclose() . It happened to me that it returned errors when
the file I was trying to close was already closed (which usually meant  I
had a bug, because I closed one file  twice, another never. It also failed
with "no space left on device", when it was trying to flush the rest of the
data that was on the way to the file.

Orna


On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 11:49 PM, Elazar Leibovich <elazarl at gmail.com>wrote:

> I was always intrigued by this unix tidbit, closing a file can return an
> error. In practice, it is rarely checked (as far as I've seen)
>
> What does it mean? If I understand it correctly, recent write can lie
> about its success.
>
> But when do you really need it? If you have a piece of information you
> want to make sure it hits the disk, the reasonable thing to do is to fsync
> the file, and check the error of the fsync. If you don't care about it that
> much, then don't check the error, you don't have much to do even if it
> failed. It seems to me that one can make close return void, and point the
> one who wishes to make sure data hit the disk to fsync.
>
> What's the practical use case, where you care about close() error, but you
> don't care enough to need an fsync.
>
> Another question is, why let write lie about its success, what does it
> gain you? Let close return void, and force write never to defer its error
> reporting.
>
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>


-- 
Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda.
http://ladypine.org
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