On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 10:07:40AM +0200, Thomas Rast wrote: > The manpage for dup2 does, however, say > > If newfd was open, any errors that would have been reported at > close(2) time are lost. A careful programmer will not use dup2() or > dup3() without closing newfd first. > > which is probably what you were referring to. Yes, that's probably one reason why I had this stuck in my mind (though, how often does anyone bother to detect errors on close()...? ;-). Funnily enough, POSIX.2008 specifies that if closing newfd would fail, dup2() reports EIO and newfd is not closed, eliminating this problem. The manpage does not cover this; well, that's fair enough as Linux just doesn't care and never does that if I didn't miss anything in the code. -- Petr "Pasky who might even send a patch, but the matter is oh so obscure" Baudis -- To unsubscribe from this list: 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