In article <199904061701.kaa09...@apollo.backplane.com>, Matthew Dillon <dil...@apollo.backplane.com> wrote: > : > :It's not necessarily breakage. Not having any mechanism other than > :open to get your own seek offset is nasty, but sharing a seek offset > :can also be useful. File descriptors can't be "reverse-inherited", so > :in order to continue writing to the same redirected output file, a > :sequence of commands executed by a shell needs to be able to share the > :actual file offset. I believe this was the original reason for the > :behavior. > > If it's a redirected output file you simply make it O_APPEND, at which > point the seek offset in the descriptor becomes irrelevant.
But O_APPEND didn't exist in early versions of Unix. I'm sure it wasn't present in V6, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't present in V7 either. John -- John Polstra j...@polstra.com John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA "Self-interest is the aphrodisiac of belief." -- James V. DeLong To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message