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Re: touch --inside: new option for gzipped files
From: |
Bruno Haible |
Subject: |
Re: touch --inside: new option for gzipped files |
Date: |
Mon, 2 Jun 2003 13:12:01 +0200 (CEST) |
Jim Meyering writes:
> Thanks for doing that.
> I like the idea, but have a couple questions.
> Shouldn't it give a diagnostic and fail when the open from
> `time_from_inside' fails?
Maybe.
"touch --inside" is a best-effort operation, which will not work on
all those files that don't have a timestamp inside them. If I do
"touch --inside /mirror/gnu/*"
as a user, I don't want error messages that tell me that the various
directories and READMEs didn't have a timestamp. Same reason why now
"grep xyz *" doesn't emit an error message any more when it encounters
a directory.
Now is it better to treat unreadable files like empty files, i.e. like
files without timestamp? I don't know.
> And wouldn't it be better also to use O_NONBLOCK | O_NOCTTY, as
> for the other open call?
Maybe. One has to test whether "touch --inside /dev/tty" hangs or not.
I can agree to it as long as you are sure that O_NONBLOCK, applied to
regular files, has no effect (I'm not sure POSIX guarantees this).
Bruno