1 /* closeout.c - close standard output
2 Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
5 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
6 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
9 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
10 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
11 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
12 GNU General Public License for more details.
14 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
15 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
16 Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
24 # define _(Text) gettext (Text)
33 # define EXIT_FAILURE 1
45 /* Close standard output, exiting with status STATUS on failure.
46 If a program writes *anything* to stdout, that program should close
47 stdout and make sure that the close succeeds. Otherwise, suppose that
48 you go to the extreme of checking the return status of every function
49 that does an explicit write to stdout. The last printf can succeed in
50 writing to the internal stream buffer, and yet the fclose(stdout) could
51 still fail (due e.g., to a disk full error) when it tries to write
52 out that buffered data. Thus, you would be left with an incomplete
53 output file and the offending program would exit successfully.
55 Besides, it's wasteful to check the return value from every call
56 that writes to stdout -- just let the internal stream state record
57 the failure. That's what the ferror test is checking below.
59 It's important to detect such failures and exit nonzero because many
60 tools (most notably `make' and other build-management systems) depend
61 on being able to detect failure in other tools via their exit status. */
63 close_stdout_status (int status)
66 error (status, 0, _("write error"));
67 if (fclose (stdout) != 0)
68 error (status, errno, _("write error"));
71 /* Close standard output, exiting with status EXIT_FAILURE on failure. */
75 close_stdout_status (EXIT_FAILURE);