This has been a known issue for a long time. Example:
printf "word" > /dev/full
wouldn't report there's not enough space on the device.
This is due to the fact that every libc has internal buffers
for stdout which store fragments of written data until they reach
a certain size or on some callback to flush them all at once to the
kernel.
You can force the libc to flush them with fflush(). In case flushing
fails, you can check the return value of fflush() and report an error.
However, previously, sbase didn't have such checks and without fflush(),
the libc silently flushes the buffers on exit without checking the errors.
No offense, but there's no way for the libc to report errors in the exit-
condition.
GNU coreutils solve this by having onexit-callbacks to handle the flushing
and report issues, but they have obvious deficiencies.
After long discussions on IRC, we came to the conclusion that checking the
return value of every io-function would be a bit too much, and having a
general-purpose fclose-wrapper would be the best way to go.
It turned out that fclose() alone is not enough to detect errors. The right
way to do it is to fflush() + check ferror on the fp and then to a fclose().
This is what fshut does and that's how it's done before each return.
The return value is obviously affected, reporting an error in case a flush
or close failed, but also when reading failed for some reason, the error-
state is caught.
the !!( ... + ...) construction is used to call all functions inside the
brackets and not "terminating" on the first.
We want errors to be reported, but there's no reason to stop flushing buffers
when one other file buffer has issues.
Obviously, functionales come before the flush and ret-logic comes after to
prevent early exits as well without reporting warnings if there are any.
One more advantage of fshut() is that it is even able to report errors
on obscure NFS-setups which the other coreutils are unable to detect,
because they only check the return-value of fflush() and fclose(),
not ferror() as well.
Okay, why yet another recurse()-refactor?
The last one added the recursor-struct, which simplified things
on the user-end, but there was still one thing that bugged me a lot:
Previously, all fn()'s were forced to (l)stat the paths themselves.
This does not work well when you try to keep up with H-, L- and P-
flags at the same time, as each utility-function would have to set
the right function-pointer for (l)stat every single time.
This is not desirable. Furthermore, recurse should be easy to use
and not involve trouble finding the right (l)stat-function to do it
right.
So, what we needed was a stat-argument for each fn(), so it is
directly accessible. This was impossible to do though when the
fn()'s are still directly called by the programs to "start" the
recurse.
Thus, the fundamental change is to make recurse() the function to
go, while designing the fn()'s in a way they can "live" with st
being NULL (we don't want a null-pointer-deref).
What you can see in this commit is the result of this work. Why
all this trouble instead of using nftw?
The special thing about recurse() is that you tell the function
when to recurse() in your fn(). You don't need special flags to
tell nftw() to skip the subtree, just to give an example.
The only single downside to this is that now, you are not allowed
to unconditionally call recurse() from your fn(). It has to be
a directory.
However, that is a cost I think is easily weighed up by the
advantages.
Another thing is the history: I added a procedure at the end of
the outmost recurse to free the history. This way we don't leak
memory.
A simple optimization on the side:
- if (h->dev == st.st_dev && h->ino == st.st_ino)
+ if (h->ino == st.st_ino && h->dev == st.st_dev)
First compare the likely difference in inode-numbers instead of
checking the unlikely condition that the device-numbers are
different.
For loop detection, a history is mandatory. In the process of also
adding a flexible struct to recurse, the recurse-definition was moved
to fs.h.
The motivation behind the struct is to allow easy extensions to the
recurse-function without having to change the prototypes of all
functions in the process.
Adding flags is really simple as well now.
Using the recursor-struct, it's also easier to see which defaults
apply to a program (for instance, which type of follow, ...).
Another change was to add proper stat-lstat-usage in recurse. It
was wrong before.
While auditing du(1) I realized that there's no way the over 100 lines
of procedures in du() would pass the audit.
Instead, I decided to rewrite this section using recurse() from libutil.
However, the issue was that you'd need some kind of payload to count
the number of bytes in the subdirectories and use them in the higher
hierarchies.
The solution is to add a "void *data" data pointer to each recurse-
function-prototype, which we might also be able to use in other
recurse-applications.
recurse() itself had to be augmented with a recurse_samedev-flag, which
basically prevents recurse from leaving the current device.
Now, let's take a closer look at the audit:
1) Removing the now unnecessary util-functions push, pop, xrealpath,
rename print() to printpath(), localize some global variables.
2) Only pass the block count to nblks instead of the entire stat-
pointer.
3) Fix estrtonum to use the minimum of LLONG_MAX and SIZE_MAX.
4) Use idiomatic argv+argc-loop
5) Report proper exit-status.
It actually makes the binaries smaller, the code easier to read
(gems like "val == true", "val == false" are gone) and actually
predictable in the sense of that we actually know what we're
working with (one bitwise operator was quite adventurous and
should now be fixed).
This is also more consistent with the other suckless projects
around which don't use boolean types.
