How disappointing

Posted Sep 11, 2011 22:14 UTC (Sun) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410)
In reply to: How disappointing by nix
Parent article: Ensuring data reaches disk

How about "close_with_flags" ?

How disappointing

Posted Sep 11, 2011 23:51 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

Again, ugh ('with'?). I'd simply say close_replace(), no need for a flag or indeed any parameters at all. This means it has the same prototype as close(), so if anyone wants to choose between calling close() or close_replace() at runtime, they can just use a function pointer.

How disappointing

Posted Sep 23, 2011 0:59 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link] (3 responses)

If it is opened with the atomic-replace semantic, I would just have plain close() do the replacement.

There may be a need to somehow "abort" the file so that it is as though you never started writing it. But it may be sufficient to do this if the process owning the fd exits without calling close().

I very much disagree with others that say POSIX should be followed. The suggested method of writing a file is what is wanted in probably 95% of the time that files are written. It should be the basic operation, while "dynamic other processes can see the blocks change as I write them" is an extremely rare operation that should be the one requiring complex hacks.

How disappointing

Posted Nov 8, 2020 23:05 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

And then what happens if the file is hardlinked, and you want to modify the original file, not make a modified copy...

The trouble with POSIX is it is based on Unix and, sorry guys, Unix is crap as a commercial OS. It won because it was cheap and good enough.

And I curse it regularly because, unlike a lot of people today, I've actually had experience of real commercial OSs. Trouble is, they've died because they cost too much to maintain :-(

(Mind you, I've used real commercial OSs that had those flags to do fancy file-system stuff, and when they have bugs they really do have bugs ...)

Cheers,
Wol

How disappointing

Posted Nov 9, 2020 7:52 UTC (Mon) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

The trouble with POSIX is it is based on Unix and, sorry guys, Unix is crap as a commercial OS. It won because it was cheap and good enough.

No, commercial Unix lost to Windows because Windows was cheap and good enough. Only 99 dollars!. (This was not a real ad, though.)

I also don't buy the argument that Unix cost more to maintain per user. Back then, Unix was a multi-user operating system that was centrally administered. Then came DOS and Windows and every user had their individual problems.

How disappointing

Posted Nov 9, 2020 10:11 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Except I was comparing Unix against proprietary OS's from the likes of DEC, Honeywell, Pr1me, etc.

While Unix was eating the mini-computers' lunch, yes, Windows came along and started eating its lunch ...

Cheers,
Wol