Re: [RFC v1] man/man2/close.2: CAVEATS: Document divergence from POSIX.1-2024

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

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Hi Zack,

On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 07:33:58PM -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote:
[...]

> This is a full top-to-bottom rewrite of the manpage; please speak
> up if you don't like any of my changes to any of it, not just the
> new stuff about delayed errors.  It's written in freeform text for
> ease of reading; I'll do proper troff markup after the text is
> finalized.  (Alejandro, do you have a preference between -man
> and -mdoc markup?)

Strong preference for man(7).

[...]
> ERRORS
>        EBADF  The fd argument was not a valid, open file descriptor.
> 
>        EINTR  The close() call was interrupted by a signal.
>               The file descriptor *may or may not* have been closed,
>               depending on the operating system.  See “Signals and
>               close(),” below.

Punctuation like commas should go outside of the quotes (yes, I know
some styles do that, but we don't).

[...]

> STANDARDS
>        POSIX.1-2024.
> 
> HISTORY
>        The close() system call was present in Unix V7.

That would be simply stated as:

	V7.

We could also document the first POSIX standard, as not all Unix APIs
were standardized at the same time.  Thus:

	V7, POSIX.1-1988.

Thanks!


Have a lovely night!
Alex

> 
>        POSIX.1-2024 clarified the semantics of delayed errors; prior
>        to that revision, it was unspecified whether a close() call
>        that returned a delayed error would close the file descriptor.
>        However, we are not aware of any systems where it didn’t.
> 
> SEE ALSO
>        close_range(2), fcntl(2), fsync(2), fdatasync(2), shutdown(2),
>        unlink(2), open(2), read(2), write(2), fopen(3), fclose(3)

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>

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