The RFC patch below adds a new flag for dup3(). (For simplicity, I'm just reusing O_EXCL for now.) I am assuming calling f_op->flush() twice instead of just once before closing the file is not harmful. The idea is to extend dup3() so that we can catch close() errors for the descriptor to be replaced, if we want to. Existing code will not see any changes. (Userspace might wish to replace a descriptor exactly because there is a problem, so we don't want to make this unconditional. This approach relies on close() having a single error path in Linux: the file has an f_op->flush() handler, and it returns an error. Here, if the flag is included in dup3(), f_op->flush() is called early for newfd, and if it fails, dup3() will return with -EIO. It will still be called again in filp_close(), but since the descriptor is to be closed, there should be no activity between the two f_op->flush() calls, so the latter should not fail. Is there a reason (besides having yet another O_ flag) why this would not work, or why we would not want to do this? Am I missing something? I just want be able to know if a problem was detected, that's all. Best, Nominal Animal diff -u5 -bar linux-3.16-rc3/fs/file.c linux-3.16-rc3.new/fs/file.c --- linux-3.16-rc3/fs/file.c 2014-06-30 00:11:36.000000000 +0300 +++ linux-3.16-rc3.new/fs/file.c 2014-07-02 02:04:23.708114821 +0300 @@ -816,21 +816,31 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE3(dup3, unsigned int, oldfd, unsigned int, newfd, int, flags) { int err = -EBADF; - struct file *file; + struct file *file, *tofree; struct files_struct *files = current->files; - if ((flags & ~O_CLOEXEC) != 0) + if ((flags & ~(O_CLOEXEC | O_EXCL)) != 0) return -EINVAL; if (unlikely(oldfd == newfd)) return -EINVAL; if (newfd >= rlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE)) return -EBADF; spin_lock(&files->file_lock); + if (unlikely(flags & O_EXCL)) { + tofree = fcheck(newfd); + if (tofree && file_count(tofree) && tofree->f_op->flush) { + spin_unlock(&files->file_lock); + err = tofree->f_op->flush(tofree, files); + if (unlikely(err < 0)) + return -EIO; + spin_lock(&files->file_lock); + } + } err = expand_files(files, newfd); file = fcheck(oldfd); if (unlikely(!file)) goto Ebadf; if (unlikely(err < 0)) { -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html