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 [EMAIL PROTECTED], 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. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Imagine a large red swirl here.
