I think people have mis-remembered things (or I have completely
misunderstood them!)
On Wed, 5 May 2004, Tom Kistner wrote:
> Andrew - Supernews wrote:
>
> > If you close stderr and don't plan on immediately reopening it, then
> > always, always point it at /dev/null instead.
>
> Good plan. I'm not sure what the reasons are for closing the fds
> (getting rid of a terminal!?), but I'll leave that to Philip. The
> problem is big, since a lot of code is now linked into exim that may
> sputter to fds 1/2 under some circumstances ...
BUT BUT BUT ... from ChangeLog-4.21:-
72. When Exim is about to re-exec itself, it ensures that the file descriptors
0, 1, and 2 exist, because some OS complain for execs without them (see
ChangeLog 4.05/30). If necessary, Exim opens /dev/null to use for these
descriptors. However, the code omitted to check that the open succeeded,
causing mysterious errors if for some reason the permissions on /dev/null
got screwed. Now Exim writes a message to the main and panic logs, and
bombs out if it can't open /dev/null.
> regards,
>
> /tom
HTH,
Richard
