Re: Cleaning up elkscmd and adding help text - Questions

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2015 09:19:56 +0100
Nils Stec <nils.stec@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> i started to write some patches, at the moment 2. Now it's the time to 
> ask you guys some questions about that.
> 
> I wrote a patch for cat which shows the user some usage-information.
> Jody Bruchon used write() for this purpose, other tools are using 
> fprintf(stderr, ....).
> I don't know which i should prefer. In my opinion i would rather use 
> fprintf.
> STDERR should be the output for operations, right?

A lot of small programs try and avoid using stdio as it makes them a lot
smaller in memory and on disk if they do so.

> 
> I wrote a second patch, which adds some more functionality to cp.
> It adds three command-line-options:
>      -v    be verbose
>      -i     be interactive, ask before overwriting
>      -n    don't overwrite files
> 
> i want to add 3 more options:
>      -u    update-only (only overwrite if source is newer)
>      -b    make a backup if destination file already exists
>      -f     force, if destfile cannot be opened, remove it, try again.
> 
> 
> Is this the right way to write code for this project? It's the first 
> time I'm doing this in here and i don't wan't to do things wrong...
> 
> I think these two patches are still just drafts - i send them because i 
> want to show, i know theres more work to do on this two patches.

They look ok to me, in fact the bug I see in patch #2 isn't yours - the
existing code is not checking if the malloc of buf fails.... (and given
its always needed it looks like it could just be declared as a fixed
static buffer so that malloc isn't needed at all)

Alan