Re: Redirections and noclobber

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 05:02:00PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in bug #275140, I was made aware of a problem with the handling of
> tempfiles in tetex's maintainer scripts, and it seems to be a general
> problem. Basically, we do
> 
> tempfile=`mktemp`
> echo something > $tempfile
> 
> and this will fail if the noclobber option is set in the executing
> shell, because after mktemp the $tempfile exists. 
> 
> It is easy to fix this:
> 
> echo something >| $tempfile
> 
> but both I and the bug submitter were puzzled that we didn't find any
> previous discussions about the topic. Obviously, noclobber is only
> rarely used (otherwise we would have gotten bugreports earlier), but I
> see no reason, neither in Policy nor in "common sense", why root
> shouldn't use it. On the other hand, this usage of mktemp has been
> the result of discussions on debian-tetex-maint@l.d.o, and I'm quite
> sure to have seen it elsewhere.

In my opinion, noclobber should only be set for interactive shell, or
explicitely in a shell-script. The same for most others shell options.

Now, does POSIX sh support >|  ?

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.