From: Junio C Hamano Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 05:20:39 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] Refactor recv_sideband() Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <146705966655.11886.6547584744094511110@typhoon> Lukas Fleischer writes: > I do not see how using fwrite() buys us anything. Neither fwrite() nor > fputs() nor fprintf() guarantee to call write() only once. That is not the point. Your first attempt split what used to be a single fprintf(), which (as Nico explained) ordinarily will result in an atomic write as long as you are feeding a reasonable size buf, into two calls, _guaranteeing_ that it will _not_ be atomic. That was a bad change. By accumulating things in strbuf (instead of char[] with hand-rolled counting logic like the original before your patch) and feeding the result out to a single fprintf(stderr, "%s", buf.buf), you will not be making anything _worse_ compared to the code before your patch. At the same time, you _are_ making the logic to accumulate the output to a buffer far easier to read, which would be a net plus.