Particularly on network file systems, a stat call may require submitting a message over the network and waiting interruptably for a reply. Signed-off-by: Keno Fischer <keno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- The catalyst for this patch was me experiencing EINTR errors when using the 9p file system. In linux commit 9523feac, the 9p file system was changed to use wait_event_killable instead of wait_event_interruptible, which does indeed address my problem, but also makes me a bit unhappy, because uninterruptable waits prevents things like ^C'ing the execution and some debugging tools which depend on being able to cancel long-running operations by sending signals. I'd like to ask the user space applications I care about to properly handle such situations (either by using SA_RESTART or by explicitly handling EINTR), but it's a bit of a hard sell if EINTR isn't documented to be a possibility. I'm hoping this doc PATCH will generate a discussion of whether EINTR is an appropriate thing for stat (as a stand in for a file system call that's not read/write) to return. If so, I'd be happy to submit patches to other file system-related syscalls along these same lines. I realize I'm probably 20 years too late here, but it feels like clarificaion on what to expect from the kernel would still go a long way here. man2/stat.2 | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/man2/stat.2 b/man2/stat.2 index dad9a01..f10235a 100644 --- a/man2/stat.2 +++ b/man2/stat.2 @@ -452,6 +452,11 @@ Invalid flag specified in is relative and .I dirfd is a file descriptor referring to a file other than a directory. +.TP +.B EINTR +The call was interrupted by delivery of a signal caught by a handler; see +.BR signal (7). +The possibility of this error is file-system dependent. .SH VERSIONS .BR fstatat () was added to Linux in kernel 2.6.16; -- 2.8.1
