Bug in open() function (?)

J.C. Wren (jcwren@jcwren.com)
Fri, 11 Jul 2003 23:09:08 -0400


I was playing around today and found that if an existing file is opened with
O_TRUNC | O_RDONLY, the existing file is truncated. This is contrary to the
documentation for "man 2 open". Which behavior is correct, the man page, or
what actually happens? Or wold this be considered a glibc/libc problem?
This is on a stock 2.5.74 kernel.

'man 2 open', on O_TRUNC: If the file already exists and is a regular file
and the open mode allows writing (i.e., is O_RDWR or O_WRONLY) it will be
truncated to length 0.

--John

#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd;

if ((fd = open ("test", O_TRUNC | O_RDONLY)) == -1)
{
printf ("%d:%s\n", errno, strerror (errno));
exit (1);
}

close (fd);

exit (0);
}

[bash] cc test.c
[bash] ls -l >test
[bash] ls -l test
-rw-r--r-- 1 jcw users 195 Jul 11 23:06 test
[bash] ./a.out
[bash] ls -l test
-rw-r--r-- 1 jcw users 0 Jul 11 23:06 test

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