Hacker News Reader

Comment by sunfish | Hacker News Reader

This is true, however if we modify the program to print a 4096-byte long string instead of just the "hello world" string, then it's not sufficient again. And of course, the number 4096 is system-dependent.

So to really do hello world in C right, in addition to fflush, you also need to check the return value from puts. I've never seen any C tutorial do that though.

View on HN

Because errors on FILE streams are persisted until clearerr, it should be sufficient to check the return value of fflush at the end of the program. Presumably the FILE I/O interface was deliberately designed this way, so error checking could be consolidated at the end of a series of operations.

What would be the expected reaction if either puts or fflush returns an error code? You might think, write a message on stderr (which may be different from stdout), but what if stderr is also redirected to a full device? How would you react to the error code returned from that?

To me this is an indication that you need to know the context in which the program gets run, and its purpose in that context. Or you'd have to specify every edge case, but I've never seen that really work in practice.

> What would be the expected reaction if either puts or fflush returns an error code? You might think, write a message on stderr (which may be different from stdout), but what if stderr is also redirected to a full device? How would you react to the error code returned from that?

I don't think you would react any differently on stderr failure unless you had a more complex system with alternate ways to report such things configured.

Just ignore it and continue to report the major error (stdout) in your exit status.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) { return !(puts("Hello, new world!") == EOF); /* return 0 unless a rare I/O error occurs */ }

First off, main should return 0 on success, not 1. Second, puts() will happily return 0 when writing to /dev/full.

Only if the write is buffered, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com