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From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
Message-Id: <199611182241.XAA02531@uriah.heep.sax.de>
Subject: Re: diff somehow does not work properly in 2.2-ALPHA
To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD bugs list)
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 23:41:47 +0100 (MET)
Cc: jin@george.lbl.gov
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
In-Reply-To: <96Nov18.120623pst.177557@crevenia.parc.xerox.com> from Bill Fenner at "Nov 18, 96 12:06:17 pm"
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As Bill Fenner wrote:

> Someone closed stdout, right near the beginning of the program.  It
> might even be before main() gets control, my untrained eye can't say.
> It's the last system call before a readlink() of /etc/malloc.conf,
> which might or might not point to something.  A section of the
> interpreted ktrace:

>  13410 diff     CALL  close(0x1)
>  13410 diff     RET   close 0
>  13410 diff     CALL  readlink(0x8077d3a,0xefbfd8f0,0x3f)
>  13410 diff     NAMI  "/etc/malloc.conf"
>  13410 diff     RET   readlink -1 errno 2 No such file or directory
> 
> Since stdout is closed, diff can't write to it later when it wants to
> display its output, thus "write error".

Seems to be intentional.  Somehow, writing to the output file
failed:

  ...
  val = compare_files (0, argv[optind], 0, argv[optind + 1], 0);

  /* Print any messages that were saved up for last.  */
  print_message_queue ();

  check_stdout ();
  exit (val);
  return val;
}

...with:

static void
check_stdout ()
{
  if (ferror (stdout) || fclose (stdout) != 0)
    fatal ("write error");
}

(The malloc is supposedly called as part of the fprintf().)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)