[2025-03-07 17:28:15+0100] Alejandro Colomar via austin-group-l at The Open
Group:
Hi Eric,
On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 09:19:34AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
On Thu, Mar 06, 2025 at 07:31:56PM +0100, Alejandro C via austin-group-l at The
Open Group wrote:
> Do we really need the -q option?
The original reporter (Mark Lundblad - illiliti) recommended it and
argued that it is fairly commonly implemented. The example also shows
it in use:
1. Create and use a temporary file, ignoring failure.
<tt>file=$(mktemp -q file.XXXXXX) && {
echo ... > "$file" # Use $file within this block
rm "$file"
}</tt>
But I acknowledge that the same can be accomplished with:
file=$(mktemp file.XXXXXX 2>/dev/null) && {
...
rm "$file"
}
at which point you are right that -q does not buy much functionality,
other than happening to be something to standardize because it is
common among implementations.
I think we shouldn't standardize it. If one wants to write a small
POSIX system from scratch, aiming minimalism, this flag is absolutely
useless, having the better 2>/dev/null which is useful for every
command.
As a user, I also think it's easier to read the code with 2>/dev/null,
since I don't need to read any documentation to check what flag X to
command Y means.
For systems that already have that flag, it's useful to keep it working
for scripts that already exist, but we don't need to standardize it for
that.
Have a lovely day!
Alex
--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
There might be a useful difference between -q and 2>/dev/null
if it's changed to only silence creation errors as seen in some
implementations manuals from note 0006166:
<https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1616#c6166>
While 2>/dev/null would also hide at least:
- name generation errors when custom, like getrandom() failure
- badly formed template errors, for which mkstemp()/mkdtemp() uses EINVAL
On a mote personal note, I found it easy enough to implement this kind of -q,
while if it would be all errors then I'd feel like it would be purely
redundant with 2>/dev/null.
Best Regards
