Re: Why side-effects on open(2) are evil. (was Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH]device arguments from lookup)

Edgar Toernig
2001-05-20T00:07:02Z

nitpicking: a system call without side effects would be pretty useless.

Alexander Viro wrote:
> A lot of stuff relies on the fact that close(open(foo, O_RDONLY)) is a
> no-op. Breaking that assumption is a Bad Thing(tm).

That assumption is totally bogus. Even for regular files you have side
effects (atime); for anything else they're unpredictable.

Ciao, ET.