Re: minor bug in bash

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/17/12 7:04 PM, Zachary Miller wrote:
> 
> hello,
> 
> i would like to report a what i believe to be a minor bug in bash 4.2 that has
> to do with file redirection:
> 
> in redir.c:356 (function write_here_document()), this block of code:
>       if (write (fd, document, document_len) < document_len)
>         {
>           if (errno == 0)
>             errno = ENOSPC;
>           return (errno);
>         }
>       else
>         return 0;
> 
> checks for a short write() but doesn't retry writing the remainder of the 
> bytes
> (and in fact returns ENOSPC instead, even though no error has yet occurred).
> 
> according to the man page for write(2), fewer bytes may be written and this is
> not by itself an error.

Thanks for the report.  As a practical matter, this doesn't present a
problem.  When writing to a regular file, with no special flags supplied
to open(), the only cases Posix says it can return fewer bytes than
specified are errors.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/