3 ms·

Isn't it obvious? Warn the user, who can now use something else instead.

• lexicality 2y ago
  That only works if the "user" is an interactive TTY with a human on the other end of it though. What if I tried using this for compressing automatic backups? Do I need an error handling routine that uses something else?
  • vardump 2y ago
    A backup system should be reliable and be able to report errors. No matter what they may be.
  • jeroenhd 2y ago
    Your automatic backups may actually be corrupted by random bit flips. Happens quite a lot with ZFS NAS systems where the admin forgot to set up a scrub job and still uses incremental backups. Any read or write could fail for a multitude of reasons. The chance of an entire file being lost is rather small, but it's still an edge case that can happen in the real world if the FS flips to read only at just the wrong time. Hell, on platforms like macOS, you can't even assume fsync returning success will actually write floating data to storage!