Re: Cleaning up elkscmd and adding help text - Questions

Alan Cox
2015-03-27T13:54:46Z

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