Hello Mats, On 30 August 2016 at 03:17, Mats Wichmann <mats@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 08/28/2016 02:48 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > >> So, it's not going to be possible to explain every corner case here, but >> text such as you suggest is good to alert the programmer. Starting from >> your suggestion, I reworked this to: >> >> For many pseudofiles that are autogenerated by the kernel, stat() >> does not return an accurate value in the st_size field. For exam‐ >> ple, the value 0 is returned for many files under the /proc direc‐ >> tory, while various files under /sys report a size of 4096 bytes, >> even though the file content is smaller. For such files, one >> should simply try to read as many bytes as possible (and append >> '\0' to the returned buffer if it is to be interpreted as a >> string). >> >> Okay? > > Is it possibly better to not suggest that for some /proc files it might > still be useful? (I don't actually know if there are cases where it is): > > "For pseudofiles that are autogenerated by the kernel, stat() does not > return a meaningful value in the st_size field". Yes, some scripting confirms you are right. I changed the wording as you suggest. Thanks for catching that! Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
