Checking system call returns (Was Re: Complexity of reallocating storage (was users command crap))

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <91Feb4.235043edt.1032 at smoke.cs.toronto.edu> moraes at cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) writes:
> Responding to a system call failure by at least printing a warning
> message would be better than blithely carrying on,

How do you propose to do this, given that the program in question
generally doesn't have a stderr to send messages to? If your answer is
``syslog,'' has it occurred to you that any syslog implementation must
either lose messages in some cases or must allow a denial-of-service
attack by one program upon all others that use the service? (UDP-based
syslogs have the first problem. Named pipe/UNIX-domain socket-based
syslogs have the second problem.)

---Dan