Hi Alejandro,
[2025-03-07 21:09:58+0100] Alejandro Colomar via austin-group-l at The Open
Group:
Hi Haelwenn,
On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 07:39:47PM +0100, Haelwenn (lanodan) Monnier wrote:
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.
If -q should not be equivalent to 2>/dev/null, this should be well
documented in the standard. The current text listed in
<https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1616> doesn't sound good to
me. So, either the feature should be removed, or the specification
should be fixed. And if we keep it, we should make sure that all
implementations behave like that (or that the implementations that
differ would be willing to adapt, or are going to EOL soon).
Only one noted in the ticket seems to be uutils's mktemp,
which in theory is supposed to match GNU coreutils given it
inherits it's testsuite.
And GNU coreutils documents -q as "suppress diagnostics about file/dir-creation
failure"
With checking both the code and behavior, it seems like uutils mktemp
-q only hides creation errors.
<https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/src/uu/mktemp/src/mktemp.rs>
$ apk info -ev uutils
uutils-0.0.29-r0
$ uutils mktemp -q wrong_template
mktemp: too few X's in template 'wrong_template'
$ uutils mktemp -q too.XXXXXX many.XXXXXX templates.XXXXXX
mktemp: too many templates
Try 'uutils mktemp --help' for more information.
$ uutils mktemp /root/no_perms.XXXXXX
mktemp: Permission denied (os error 13) at path "/root/no_perms.uMejNY"
$ uutils mktemp -q /root/no_perms.XXXXXX
$ uutils mktemp -p /var/empty/enoent tmp.XXXXXX
mktemp: failed to create file via template '/var/empty/enoent/tmp.XXXXXX': No
such file or directory
$ uutils mktemp -q -p /var/empty/enoent tmp.XXXXXX
$ TMPDIR=/var/empty/enoent uutils mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXX
mktemp: failed to create file via template '/var/empty/enoent/tmp.XXXXXX': No
such file or directory
$ TMPDIR=/var/empty/enoent uutils mktemp -q -t tmp.XXXXXX
$
Best regards
