On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 7:14 PM, Jim Meyering <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: >> Isaac Schwabacher wrote: >> >>> This is confusing at best >> >> Yes, at the very least the documentation should be improved. I installed >> the attached patch to try to do that. >> >>> Is it really better for a read on stdin to fail with EBADF rather than >>> simply returning EOF >> >> >> It depends on whether we want GNU nohup to be a universal donor or a >> universal acceptor. Right now it's more the former (if a program works with >> GNU nohup it should be portable to other nohup platforms); a nohup that >> makes stdin read from /dev/null would be more "accepting" of badly-written >> code developed elsewhere. I suppose I could be talked into that, >> particularly given Matlab's misbehavior here. Jim? > > My rationale (didn't check and assume it was I) was that it is > better to fail in a way more likely to alert the incautious user > that they have misused the tool, rather than to silently > accept questionable usage. > > Considering it has been this way for 10 years, and has > exposed real bugs in client code, I am inclined to prefer > the existing behavior. > > Don't shoot the messenger?
Thinking about this some more, I conclude that history, and the ability to expose a few misuses are perhaps not sufficient argument for maintaining the status quo. So if you (Paul) want to flip nohup to universal acceptor, I would not object.
