Akim Demaille wrote: > Le 29 janv. 2012 à 21:18, Jim Meyering a écrit : > >>> For my education: why not closing stderr too? Sure, it's >>> then hard to decide where to send the error message, but at least >>> the exit status would change. >> >> If we're writing anything to stderr, it's probably because >> there's already been some error (why else write to stderr?), > > There can be warnings send to stderr too. Or logs > if some verbose mode is activated. > >> and thus the exit status will already be nonzero. >> >> There might be a case for it in bison, though, if it generates >> non-diagnostics to stderr. > > They are diagnostics, but not hard errors. And anyway, as the > point is safety, I just wondered what's the point of closing > stdout only, and not both stdout and stderr in every single > program, just for regularity. > > Sure, what is sent to stdout is certainly more important than > stderr, but while at it...
Hi Akim, So are these soft diagnostics important enough that their loss (due to failed write-to-stderr) would merit inducing a nonzero exit status? Hey! I know... exit (0.5) :-) But seriously, I suppose a patch (maybe even a new gnulib module -- I haven't looked) would be welcome solely on principle. Probably via an atexit-callable function very similar to close_stdout.
