Ambiguous sentence in POSIX onlinepubs 11.1.11

[Ed Schouten]

Hello everyone,

The last couple of days I've been reading the POSIX onlinepubs now and
then to find out how my new mpsafe TTY implementation conforms to POSIX.

In section 11.1.11, there is the following sentence:

	"The last process to close a terminal device file shall cause
	any output to be sent to the device and any input to be
	discarded."

This sentence is quite ambiguous. It could mean:

	"The last process to close a terminal device file shall cause
	any output to be sent to the device, [but] any input to be
	discarded."

but it could also mean:

	"The last process to close a terminal device file shall cause
	any output [which still has] to be sent to the device and any
	input to be discarded."

I know FreeBSD currently implements the first behaviour. It drains
output on closure, but how can we know for sure this is the correct
behaviour?

After I read POSIX, I changed my mpsafetty branch to perform the second
behaviour, but after that I reread the section and discovered the
sentence was actually ambiguous.

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://g-rave.nl/
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