close(), exceptions and problems

[David Bolen]

erwin at andreasen.com (Erwin S. Andreasen) writes:

> What exactly do you mean by "interrupted" ?
> 
> close(), the system call, usually cannot fail (unless you try to close a fd
> that is not open).

Note that close() is often is the point at which buffered data is
flushed to a file, so there are a variety of ways in which that can
fail (I/O error, out of disk space, etc...) which will cause the
close() to fail.

I had a co-worker once who didn't check the results of a close() after
re-writing a new version of a config file following an update, and
didn't realize that it got truncated due to running out of disk space.

--
-- David
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