On 18/07/2015 07:40, Philip Guenther wrote: > You have in mind a place where this would be used? Where are there > bugs that this would resolve?
Hi Philip, I originally thought it was meant to be a performance thing in busy environments but that's because I'd misinterpreted things due to O_NONBLOCK flag. The feature was actually added to ensure whatever cat was meant to be reading from was indeed a plain file and not another which could block a process. "Use cat -f to avoid denial of service attacks by people who make .rhosts files fifos." http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2000/01/14/0069.html This diff as it stands has 2 flaws: 1) The new flag doesn't actually work as intended because the OpenBSD fopen(3) doesn't support the f mode. 2) It passes the f flag to fopen by default, I need integrate the changes from r1.24 which makes it so that the flag is only passed if it has been specified by the use. I'm happy to follow up with a new diff, the question is, is the functionality it provides of interest? Sevan
