Re: lseek(2) BSD buglet

Michael Kerrisk
2010-09-11T04:18:58Z

Hi,

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 4:09 PM, der Mouse <mouse-NcIlfYlhY41Ekk/fuQG8RGD2FQJk+8+b@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> lseek(2) (noticed on 3.23, 3.25 has similar wording) says, in part,
>
>>>        SVr1-3 returns long instead of off_t, BSD returns int.
>
>> I think removing it is fine.  Historical SysV and BSD behaviour might
>> have been interesting in the early 90s, but these days it's something
>> for a history book and not a manual page.

I agree. I removed this entire line.

> Sounds like a reasonable point of view to me.
>
> However, since the manpages are also one of the places people go when
> trying to figure out old code, I'd probably not delete it entirely but
> instead replace it with something alojng the lines of
>
>        Hisorical practice has varied, but modern systems uniformly use
>        off_t.
>
> But, really, even that may be more than is worth bothering with; it's
> been a long time since lseek returning non-off_t mattered to anyone but
> hardcore retrocomputing geeks.

Yes.

Thanks for the note. The change will be in Linux man-pages-3.27.

Cheers,

Michael

--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/