[TUHS] OT: Need help from a *BSD guru

[arnold at skeeve.com]

The problem had to do with the "inplace" extension for gawk that enables
in-place editing of files, ala perl or GNU sed -i. On BSD systems,
I was getting failures from the test suite. E.g., on a regular system,
inplace1.ok looks like:

-----------------------
before
gawk: inplace:47: warning: inplace_begin: disabling in-place editing for invalid FILENAME `-'
stdin start
is bar replaced?
stdin end
after
-----------------------

On a BSD system, I get:

-----------------------
before
gawk: inplace:47: warning: inplace_begiafter
abling in-place editing for invalid FILENAME `-'
stdin start
is bar replaced?
stdin end
-----------------------

There's some kind of buffering problem going on. The problem only
occurs when stdout and stderr are redirected to the same file:

	command line here > _out 2>&1

I tried adding all kinds of calls to fflush in all kinds of places,
but no luck. Finally, I had an "aha!" moment (an epiphany, if I'm using
the expensive word correctly :-), and made this change:

diff --git a/main.c b/main.c
index 55983789..f505c71f 100644
--- a/main.c
+++ b/main.c
@@ -246,6 +246,10 @@ main(int argc, char **argv)
 	if ((cp = getenv("GAWK_LOCALE_DIR")) != NULL)
 		locale_dir = cp;
 
+	int flags = fcntl(fileno(stderr), F_GETFL, NULL);
+	flags |= O_APPEND;
+	(void) fcntl(fileno(stderr), F_SETFL, flags);
+
 #if defined(LOCALEDEBUG)
 	initial_locale = locale;
 #endif

Forching stderr to be in append mode did the trick. WHY does that
make it work? Beats me. It's not needed on any other system.

Adventures In C Programming ...

Thanks,

Arnold




arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> Hi All.
>
> Looks like I solved my problem on my own; thanks to everyone who
> replied privately.  I will send a short note detailing the issue 
> a little later.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Arnold