> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank Ch. Eigler [mailto:fche@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, 22 February 2016 12:08 AM
> To: Ken McDonell <kenj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: 'Lukas Berk' <lberk@xxxxxxxxxx>; pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Derived metric issues
>
> Hi, Ken -
>
> > [...]
> > And finally the man page now reads like this ...
>
> > [...] Catastrophic errors such as not being able to open one of the
> > files on the given path will cause an immediate return with a
> negative
> > return value [...]
>
> Is it obvious that such an error must be considered "catastrophic"?
> The string parameter is now a colon-separated path with directories
> and/or files. Why would we want to stop after the first "not being
> able to open", instead of continuing?
For all the use cases I can think of, someone using this routine would be
doing so with an expectation that the path argument contains only readable
files and/or directories.
There is no clearly "right" answer for all of the (low probability, I would
expect) corner cases, so I think the behaviour I've implemented is OK until
I hear a plausible use case where this is produces unexpected results.
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