write/close (was Re: Trojan Horses)

[Marcus J. Ranum]

In article <35111 at cup.portal.com> ts at cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes:

>In summary, this behaviour of a file system is not acceptable.

	I couldn't agree more - but sometimes you find yourself in a
position where you have to make a program *WORK* reliably on an OS
that may have some "unacceptable" features. You then have a few options:
unemployment, fixing the OS yourself, or coding around the "features".
(this is known as the "'sh** happens' school of functional programming")

	Checking the return values of system calls that return a value
to indicate a failure is one way a serious programmer can prevent his
or her software from having "unacceptable features" like becoming
inconsistent, or crashing and burning.

mjr.
-- 
Nothing is beautiful unless it is large. Vastness and immensity can make
you forget a great many weaknesses.
	- Emperor Napoleon I, predicting the development of X-window in 1813