Debian bug report logs - #784
Infelicities in fopen manpage

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Date: Sun, 9 Apr 95 23:13 BST
From: iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson)
To: Debian bugs submission address <debian-bugs@pixar.com>
Subject: Infelicities in fopen manpage

Package: manpages
Version: 1.5-1

The manpage for fopen contains:
       Reads and writes may be intermixed on  read/write  streams
       in  any  order, and do not require an intermediate seek as
       in previous versions of stdio.  This is  not  portable  to
       other  systems,  however,  and  may  not work under Linux
       (someone should find out and fix this  manpage);  ANSI   C
       requires that    a  file positioning  function   intervene
       between  output  and  input,  unless  an input   operation
       encounters end-of-file.

Also, the description of fdopen is:
       The  fdopen function associates a stream with the existing
       file descriptor, fildes. The mode of the stream  must  be
       compatible with the mode of the file descriptor.

This does not make it clear whether fdopen dup's the file descriptor
you give it.  In other words, it doesn't tell you whether calling
fclose is sufficient to close the underlying file descriptor(s) (it
seems that it is - if you try close on the original fd after using
fdopen/fclose you get EBADF).

Ian.