Many callers of read_in_full() complain when we do not read their full byte-count. But a check like: if (read_in_full(fd, buf, len) != len) return error_errno("unable to read"); conflates two problem conditions: 1. A real error from read(). 2. There were fewer than "len" bytes available. In the first case, showing the user strerror(errno) is useful. But in the second, we may see a random errno that was set by some previous system call. In an ideal world, callers would always distinguish between these cases and give a useful message for each. But as an easy way to make our imperfect world better, let's reset errno to a known value. The best we can do is "0", which will yield something like: unable to read: Success That's not great, but at least it's deterministic and makes it clear that we didn't see an error from read(). Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> --- wrapper.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/wrapper.c b/wrapper.c index 61aba0b5c1..f55debc92d 100644 --- a/wrapper.c +++ b/wrapper.c @@ -314,6 +314,7 @@ ssize_t read_in_full(int fd, void *buf, size_t count) char *p = buf; ssize_t total = 0; + errno = 0; while (count > 0) { ssize_t loaded = xread(fd, p, count); if (loaded < 0) -- 2.14.1.1148.ga2561536a1