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I request another article from the author, about "Detecting writes to /dev/null". In this case, even close() won't return an error yet the data your application has produced will be gone! Forever (a very long time)! Oh the horrors. Should we, the program authors, detect it as well? Probably not, but let's ponder it for another 10k symbols.

Or how about our users using, not a NFS, but one of those fishy Chinese flash drives that cost $0.50 but claim to have 128 TiB of storage? So many things that we can check for, as the application developers.



This is a very well argumented and presented article, that agrees with your sentiment and ends with:

"What I can say at this point is that I personally am not going to embark on a quest to get application programmers to check for errors from close.

And so, my conclusion here is that, no, our hello world program does not have a bug. It's fine. It's just fine."

I think many programmers have felt the exasperation you so well expressed in your comment.




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