mkdir with closed stdout

[Jon Hitchcock]

If you execute mkdir version 4.0x with stdout closed it creates
the directory, writes an error message to stderr, and exits with
status 1.  POSIX-2 says that the standard output shall not be
written when the utility is used as described by POSIX-2, so it
should not matter whether it is closed or open.

To demonstrate this:

$ mkdir xyz 1>&-
mkdir: write error: Bad file descriptor
$ echo $?
1
$ rmdir xyz

I discovered this when running a very old program that, for
reasons of portability, creates a directory by forking, closing
stdin, stdout and stderr, execing "mkdir", and testing the exit
status.  It believes that mkdir has failed.

Jan Kasprzak has a patch which claims to address this issue at
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/users/kas/fileutils/fileutils-4.0-closed-stdout.p
atch
but it does not appear to be included in fileutils-4.1.

Jon Hitchcock
Uniplex Ltd, 126 Hempstead Road, Kings Langley, Herts, WD4 8AL
E-mail address@hidden, Tel +44 (0) 1923 299718, Fax 299701