Re: [Nmh-workers] extensions on tmp filenames?

[David Levine]

Earl wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 4:43 PM, David Levine wrote:
> 
> >> Documented where?  SUSv3 calls out the behaviour explicitly, as
> >> inherited from the ISO C spec.
> >
> > Well, the SUSv2 spec says:
> >
> >     If the link named by the new argument exists, it shall be removed
> >     and old renamed to new. In this case, a link named new shall
> >     remain visible to other processes throughout the renaming
> >     operation and refer either to the file referred to by new or old
> >     before the operation began.
> >
> > and that's what Linux still uses for its documentation.
> 
> For which manpage.

rename(3p)

> What you quote is not well written and is not clear on what really may
> happen.

It's clear to me that the implementation was not required to
behave as desired.  Given that we support systems that aren't
always up to date, the safe thing to do here is not use rename.

David