fflush & close behavior not well-defined

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

The close and fflush functions take a string argument indicating
which file or pipe or coprocess to close. But this may not be a
unique identifier. Consider this silly program:

BEGIN {
        # redirect output to a pipe to the md5sum program in $PATH:
        print "hello" | "md5sum"

        # redirect output to a file named md5sum in the current directory:
        print "junk" > "md5sum"

        # which file descriptor gets flushed and closed:
        # the file or the pipe or both?
        print "flushing and closing"
        fflush("md5sum")
        close("md5sum")
        print "after flush and close"
}

By studying the source and using strace, one can learn that only the most
recently opened file will be the one operated on by fflush or close. So these
operations are not actually well-defined. 

One could in theory add an additional optional argument to these functions
that specifies what type of file is being sought. For example
   fflush(<filename>, [<filetype>])
where filetype is one of ">", "|", or "|&". That would match the way
this information is stored internally in the red_head list in io.c.

Or we could document that this is nondeterministic. Or we could just
punt and pretend that nobody ever noticed this.

Regards,
Andy