return value of fprintf

[Křištof Želechovski]

Oh I see.  
Indeed, the documentation was fixed to explain this in FreeBSD 5.2 
- I must have overlooked that.  
My documentation is apparently taken from FreeBSD 4.4.  
Error return value is not documented here.
I have run the code in a loop and the return value is periodically -1.  
Interestingly enough, 
although the stream error indicator is persistent, 
it is not taken into account to prevent data corruption as in C++ streams.  
The reason may be that POSIX streams must set errno on failure 
(this is *not* required by the ANSI standard)
but there is no errno value to indicate that the error condition is set 
(except EBADF - 
but the POSIX standard should be modified to allow this extension, 
since at present it only means "Bad file descriptor").
Thanks for your time
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Oliver Fromme [mailto:olli at lurza.secnetix.de] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 8:59 AM
To: freebsd-standards at FreeBSD.ORG; giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl
Subject: Re: return value of fprintf

K?i?tof ?elechovski <giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl> wrote:
 > The
 >
<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fprintf&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpat
 > h=FreeBSD+7-current&format=html> fprintf manual page says it is ANSI C
 > compatible and it returns the number of characters printed.
 > 
 > The latter is correct: I get printf("abcd") == 4 even under >/dev/full.
 > (uname is Interix on x86 ver. 3.5)

Because the printf() function doesn't write to /dev/full
directly.  It writes to a stdio buffer associated with
the standard output stream.

 > However, the former is not: according to the ANSI C standard
 > <http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n1124.pdf> ,
§7.19.6.1/14,
 > printf should return a negative value in this case.

POSIX/SUSv4 (which is aligned with the ISO C standard)
says:  "If an output error was encountered, these
functions shall return a negative value."

FreeBSD is compliant with that specification.  Note the
use of the words "if ... encountered":  If the file
system is full, that condition is encountered _only_
the next time the stdio library flushes its buffer
(which can be as late as the close() call).  It is
_not_ encountered by the fprintf() function itself,
so it is perferctly legal that it does not return a
negative value.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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