On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > > Or if you're getting a SIGWINCH in the middle of it. > > > > Any POSIX system will interrupt the transfer and return a short read on > > receiving a signal. > > Only for interruptible fd's, though, which normally a real "file" won't > be. And _usually_ only if you actually have a SIGWINCH handler. Although older Linux kernels were broken in this regard. They'd interrupt a socket/pipe read or write even for a signal that ended up being ignored. So it's absolutely the case that having the loop is always the safer thing to do, and it's never the _wrong_ thing to do. Linus - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html