Not all archives are packed in such way to be generated without
having to recursively generate the output path.
For now, reuse the function from mkdir.c and later move it to
libutil.
Numeric fields can be <space> terminated. Ensure those are
patched with NULs so we can perform string operations.
There is more work to be done in this area, namely some fields like
name, linkname and prefix are not always null-terminated.
recurse() is getting smarter every day. I expect it to pass the Turing
test in a few months.
Along the way, it was reported that "rm -f" on nonexistant files reports
their missing as an internal recurse()-error.
So recurse() knows when to shut up, I added the SILENT flag to fix all
these things.
The restructuring of recurse() in the last few weeks actually broke
the recursion-flags in different tools.
As a long-term goal, the recursor should have a field "maxdepth"
which should be "1" for the non-Rflag-case. "0" stands for unlimited.
Basically, it's a conflict between POSIX and ISO C what do to when
input streams are passed to fflush().
POSIX mandates that the seeking-position should be synced, but ISO C
says it's undefined behaviour.
We love POSIX, but the standard-documents specify that in all conflict
cases, ISO C wins, so this breaks with EBADF on BSD's.
musl and glibc follow POSIX behaviour, which makes sense, but involves
numerous portability concerns.
To get around this, we just don't check fflush() and rely on the fact
that no implementation sets ferror on the file-stream in fflush if it
is an input stream, so every issue caught in fflush() is caught later
with ferror() and fclose().
Add a comment to fshut() because this stuff is so complicated, it
took us a day to figure out.
This has been a known issue for a long time. Example:
printf "word" > /dev/full
wouldn't report there's not enough space on the device.
This is due to the fact that every libc has internal buffers
for stdout which store fragments of written data until they reach
a certain size or on some callback to flush them all at once to the
kernel.
You can force the libc to flush them with fflush(). In case flushing
fails, you can check the return value of fflush() and report an error.
However, previously, sbase didn't have such checks and without fflush(),
the libc silently flushes the buffers on exit without checking the errors.
No offense, but there's no way for the libc to report errors in the exit-
condition.
GNU coreutils solve this by having onexit-callbacks to handle the flushing
and report issues, but they have obvious deficiencies.
After long discussions on IRC, we came to the conclusion that checking the
return value of every io-function would be a bit too much, and having a
general-purpose fclose-wrapper would be the best way to go.
It turned out that fclose() alone is not enough to detect errors. The right
way to do it is to fflush() + check ferror on the fp and then to a fclose().
This is what fshut does and that's how it's done before each return.
The return value is obviously affected, reporting an error in case a flush
or close failed, but also when reading failed for some reason, the error-
state is caught.
the !!( ... + ...) construction is used to call all functions inside the
brackets and not "terminating" on the first.
We want errors to be reported, but there's no reason to stop flushing buffers
when one other file buffer has issues.
Obviously, functionales come before the flush and ret-logic comes after to
prevent early exits as well without reporting warnings if there are any.
One more advantage of fshut() is that it is even able to report errors
on obscure NFS-setups which the other coreutils are unable to detect,
because they only check the return-value of fflush() and fclose(),
not ferror() as well.
