Why is this not a bug in qmail?

Question

I was reading DJB's "Some thoughts on security after ten years of Qmail 1.0" and he listed this function for moving a file descriptor:

int fd_move(to,from)
int to;
int from;
{
  if (to == from) return 0;
  if (fd_copy(to,from) == -1) return -1;
  close(from);
  return 0;
}

It occurred to me that this code does not check the return value of close, so I read the man page for close(2), and it seems it can fail with EINTR, in which case the appropriate behavior would seem to be to call close again with the same argument.

Since this code was written by someone with far more experience than I in both C and UNIX, and additionally has stood unchanged in qmail for over a decade, I assume there must be some nuance that I'm missing that makes this code correct. Can anyone explain that nuance to me?

Answer 1

I've got two answers:

1. He was trying to make a point about factoring out common code and often such examples omit error checking for brevity and clarity.
2. close(2) may return EINTER, but does it in practice, and if so what would you reasonably do? Retry once? Retry until success? What if you get EIO? That could mean almost anything, so you really have no reasonable recourse except logging it and moving on. If you retry after an EIO, you might get EBADF, then what? Assume that the descriptor is closed and move on?

Every system call can return EINTR, escpecially one that blocks like read(2) waiting on a slow human. This is a more likely scenario and a good "get input from terminal" routine will indeed check for this. That also means that write(2) can fail, even when writing a log file. Do you try to log the error that the logger generated or should you just give up?

Answer 2

When a file descriptor is dup'd, as it is in the fd_copy or dup2 function, you will end up with more than one file descriptor referring to the same thing (i.e. the same struct file in the kernel). Closing one of them will simply decrement its reference count. No operation is performed on the underlying object unless it is the last close. As a result, conditions such as EINTR and EIO are not possible.