RE: incompatible open modes

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Ata, John wrote:

> Hi Andries,
>
> If that's what's been decided... I presume for backwards compatability,
> but it does seem rather odd though.  After all, it seems like O_RDONLY
> is supposed to safeguard someone from accidently overwriting a file.
> Otherwise why not automatically open everything read/write?  Going down
> the same path, what's next: automatically write enabling a file which
> has been openend for O_RDONLY the next time someone performs a write
> operation on it? ;-)
>
> Take care,
> John

Historically, the word "undefined" has become synonymous with
"worst possible thing" under Unix. If some operation is "undefined"
the implementor is free to low-level format your hard disk.

This is not a good thing. For instance, the MS-DOS 'open' has
defaults that are not harmful. Not so with Unix. There are no
defaults! You must be explicit. You can even create a file you
can't delete if you don't set the permissions correctly when
opening O_CREAT. Note you can even create a file called "*" and
"*.*". So, under Unix you gotta be careful. Like somebody's
.sig said; "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself!"

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.