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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 16:42:17 +0200
From: Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl>
To: "Joseph Malicki" <jmalicki@starbak.net>
Cc: "Patrick J. LoPresti" <patl@curl.com>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: close return value
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On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 12:24:33PM -0400, Joseph Malicki wrote:

> Those mistakes are your ignorance.  The manpage is wrong.
> It does return -1 on error.

Yes, you are right (or, at least, "a negative value").
Now you deserve a beating for noting that there is a bug on
a man page without submitting a correction, or at least
telling the maintainer. (Yes, that's me.)

> Sure, if you require an event to be successful to continue you should always
> check it.  And yes, it's nice to print an error message on close sometimes,
> if something is critical.  But the question to ask is what you would
> actually _DO_ about an error... if the answer is nothing,
> then why check it?

But here you are wrong. Even if the program doesn't know what to do,
the user will want to know about it. If I make a backup and some error
occurs then I would be very unhappy if the program were silent about it.

Andries
aeb@cwi.nl
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