Re: close return value (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ext3 vs Reiserfs benchmarks)

[Elladan]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 05:43:57PM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> In article <[e-mail]>,
> Elladan  <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> >Consider what this says, if a particular OS doesn't pick a standard
> >which the application can port to.  It means that the *only way* to
> >correctly close a file descriptor is like this:
> >
> >int ret;
> >do {
> >	ret = close(fd);
> >} while(ret == -1 && errno != EBADF);
> 
> NO.
> 
> The above is
>  (a) not portable
>  (b) not current practice
> 
> The "not portable" part comes from the fact that (as somebody pointed
> out), a threaded environment in which the kernel _does_ close the FD on
> errors, the FD may have been validly re-used (by the kernel) for some
> other thread, and closing the FD a second time is a BUG.

That somebody was me.  It appears we're in extremely violent agreement
on this issue.  We both agree the code I wrote is crap.  :-)

-J