GNU Emacs

[Guy Harris]

>And though it used to be a problem on multiuser systems where you might
>not notice the messages on the console (though the system surely came to a
>crawl which everyone should notice) on these mighty PC's where one always
>uses the console this should be even more acceptable than before.

It's arguably still a problem on those multiuser systems; they haven't
gone away.

Furthermore, programs should print them *anyway*; programs should check
for I/O errors and report them.  They should also "do the right thing"
when they occur; for instance, an SMTP daemon should *not* acknowledge
receipt of mail until it has written the mail out with no errors *and*,
if at all possible, has ensured that the data has actually been written
to non-volatile storage (using "fsync" on systems that have it,
otherwise using O_SYNC mode when writing on systems that have it).  As
long as you're checking for errors such as this, it's not that much
harder to print a message as well....

Furthermore, it's not always obvious what *caused* the file system to
fill up; it might have been caused by a daemon program as opposed to a
command the user ran (or it might have been caused by a background job
the user started, or by somebody who remotely logged into your machine
running a job, or...).  A message from the program, giving the source of
the message (e.g., "ld", or maybe even better "cc"), would do that
better than just "/tmp: file system full".