Better than POSIX?

Sorry. I'll bring up whatever I see fit, whether you like that or not. But, by all means, don't listen to me and don't reply to my comments. Ignore me - that's OK. But at least do try to understand what Ted's saying.

> If a program is truly POSIX-compliant, it can't make any assumptions about what happens after a crash.

Not, it cannot make assumptions. It can make preparations as best it can (which are defined in the standard) to have data on disk. These preparations are called fsync(). Or, it can be smart and create little tiny backup files with fsync() beforehand and then be fast and keep renaming in the hope that the system doesn't crash all the time.

Either intentionally or otherwise, you keep misinterpreting what POSIX does or does not define. POSIX defines that fsync() is your best bet on having the data on disk. It doesn't define anything about rename() having ordered characteristics. It also doesn't define anything about the situation after the crash.

Out of this, you are giving people advice that the best thing to do is to go with undefined behaviour of rename() if you want your data on disk after the crash. The mind boggles...