There's a lot of "fence sitting" going on in this thread and whilst it
may be convenient, it should stop.

I have not seen one good argument for leaving EFAULT in the man page.
A lot of bluster about how it makes it easier to be lazy now and later,
yes, but nothing else.

From the 1.5 man page for pipe(2):
...
     [EFAULT]      The fildes buffer is in an invalid area of the process's
                   address space.
...

That does not document, correctly, the current behaviour.  Since it is felt
that the current behaviour is desired (ie. segmentation fault) then the
message about EFAULT should simply be removed and no mention of SIGSEGV
or similar made.

If at some point in the future our implementation of pipe(2) changes, then
at that time so should the documentation about pipe(2) change.  It is not
appropriate for man pages for system calls to attempt to be prophetic about
implementation or speculative about current behaviour.  man pages are
expected to be concise and accurate.  If anyone can demonstrate how the
mention of EFAULT adds to the accuracy of the man page, when comapred with
a version with it absent, I'd like to see it.

Darren

In some email I received from James Graham, sie wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, der Mouse wrote:
> 
> # If the manpage is the correct interface definition for pipe(2), then
> # our implementation is imply *broken*, because if you pass an invalid
> # pointer, you *don't* get EFAULT back - you get a VM signal in libc.
> 
> Aren't you supposed to get EFAULT back instead of a core signal on
> system calls?  I thought it was that way since it was the shortest path
> to the return.
> 
> # However, it also seems to me that EFAULT is a kludge: such errors
> # really *ought* to produce SIGBUS/SIGSEGV, and that they don't is a
> # historical artifact.  I would favor leaving it basically as it is,
> # except with a little text added:
> #
> #      [EFAULT]      The fildes buffer is in an invalid area of the process's
> #                    address space.  (An appropriate signal, SIGBUS or
> #                    SIGSEGV, may be generated instead of returning in this
> #                    case.)
> #
> # Indeed, as I think someone already suggested, I would say that _all_
> # EFAULT returns, with the possible exception of any that are actually
> # overloading EFAULT to indicate some other error, should have similar
> # language added, probably with a note in intro(2) as well.
> 
> ....what else would you use EFAULT for?
> 
> ....and if EFAULT is not used to indicate something that would, in
> userland, generate a SIGBUS or SIGSEGV, do we need to keep the errno?