On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, John Franklin wrote:

# If the standards say so, the standards say so.  I disagree with the
# standard on this point, but I'll concede.

~"open(2)...shall return...the lowest non-negative available file descriptor
on success.  On failure, it shall return an error value, and the global
variable errno shall be set to indicate the reason for failure."~

Considering that it's been thus since (time_t *) &UNIX[VERSION_6]; I
really don't expect it to change any time soon.  EVERYbody's programs
depend rather heavily on these semantics, whether they realise it or not.

Aside:  It took me a moment to figure out why this happened:

	$ exec >&- 2>&-
	echo foo | tee bar
	exec >&0 2>&0
	$ cat bar
	foo
	foo
	$

...until I remembered the semantics of open().

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD. Not Guano.