Re: Threaded versions of cp, mv, ls for high latency / parallel filesystems?

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 5:44 AM, Andrew McGill <address@hidden> wrote:
> At the risk of drifting off topic - is there ever a benefit in the shell
> implementing a ">"-redirection with just O_TRUNC , rather than O_TRUNC |
> O_APPEND ?

That is already the existing behaviour.

The >> redirection operator is needed to get O_APPEND.

> Does the output process ever need to seek() back in stdout?  (If
> this off topic, please feel free to flame me, and/or direct me to the correct
> forum -- but I did freely send a bug report to the bash folks, even though
> I'll bet they're not alone in omitting O_APPEND with O_TRUNC).

It's not a bug; POSIX requires >> to use O_APPEND and > not to.
See 
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_07_02

James.