Re: [PATCH] Use line buffering for standard output

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 4, 2008, 05:50 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0808032241260.3668@nehalem.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vej557hlq.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Anders Melchiorsen <mail@cup.kalibalik.dk> writes:
> >  
> >  #ifndef __MINGW32__
> > +	/* Flush output before fork() to avoid cloning the buffer */
> > +	fflush(stdout);
> > +
> >  	async->pid = fork();
> >  	if (async->pid < 0) {
> >  		error("fork (async) failed: %s", strerror(errno));
> 
> I think this with s/stdout/NULL/ would be a reasonable thing to do.

Agreed, I think that's the right thing to do.

There's another fork there in start_command(), I suspect we should do it there too: it's a "generic" path, so it should try to be safe.

The other ones look ok from a quick scan. I don't know the imap-send.c code, but it's from outside people who hopefully know what they were doing. The other ones don't seem to be using stdio before the fork (except for things like "die()" ;)

There is a "fork()" in a _comment_ in builtin-ls-tree.c, and that one definitely should have a fflush(NULL) in front of it. But it _is_ just a comment, and rather than addign a fflush() there, it would probably be better to turn it into a "start_command()" or something like that.

			Linus.