Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!husc6!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: stdio EOF
Message-ID: <8495@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 14 Sep 88 17:22:26 GMT
References: <813@ms3.UUCP> <1246@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <669@super.ORG> <8459@smoke.ARPA> <68214@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <68214@sun.uucp> shannon%datsun@Sun.COM (Bill Shannon) writes:
[re. sticky EOF]
>What you didn't notice is that it fixed many programs that were broken.

It's certainly true that there were several programs found on UNIX systems
that "read the EOF" more than once, and thus would fail miserably on files
other than static fixed-length files, most notably when reading from ttys.
Because "EOF" is not an official UNIX notion (really it is "0 bytes read")
and because this is often a transient condition, I much prefer to fix the
applications that made the bogus assumption and leave the library alone.