A possible security bug fix

[bob at ucla-locus]

From:            Bob English <bob at ucla-locus>

I think you missed the point.

What I am trying to avoid (and remember that I wasn't the one
to suggest this) is the sudden and inexplicable appearance of
standard error messages in data files.  I don't think that's an
unreasonable goal, but I don't think it should be the
responsibility of individual programs to check such things.  I
don't remember suggesting that fd's 0, 1, or 2 be immune to close
except at the command level (where they cannot be explicitly
re-opened).

Given that the stdio package exists, and is widely used, I think
it makes sense to protect its users in some fashion.  A more
elegant solution would be to prohibit opens on 0, 1, or 2 until
an explicit close has been done by that program.  That would, at
least, prevent the accidental re-opening of a stdio descriptor
(the dup call closes an existing file before opening the new one,
so that's no problem).

I don't see how this adds complexity.  Nor do I see how this is a
merge with VMS.  In fact, I'm a little confused by your comments
altogether.

--bob--