Re: close return value

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
> Returning an error and still doing the operation is slightly awkward.
> Are there any other syscalls which do similar things?

mmap(MAP_FIXED) may have already unmapped any underlying old area if an
error occurs.

And EFAULT may have strange behaviour for left-over stuff. If I remember
correctly, at some point, for example, EFAULT on a write to a TCP socket
(if the fault happened in the middle) would still send out the full-sized
packet zero-padded, because not doing so would have screwed up the state
machine.

(But EFAULT is a special case in general, it's documented to be undefined
behaviour).

I can't think of any others, but at least close() isn't _completely_
alone.

And as you say, we really cannot change it anyway, even if we wanted to
(which I'm personally convinced we do not).

		Linus