[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #62725] "help fputs" has unclear reference to EOF

[Michael Leitner]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #62725 (project octave):

Triggering is not hard: open an existing file foo for reading and try to print
a string to it: 

++
fid=fopen("foo","r");
a=fputs(fid,"bar")
--

On my system, a is indeed the double -1. Yes, your suggestion solves the
documentation bug (it is indeed a bug, because the octave interpreter does not
know EOF, different from, for example, SEEK_CUR), but I would even say that
fputs should not just pass through the return value from the internally used C
function, but rather check this return value and itself return 0 for success
and -1 for error, as it probably does already on the vast majority of
installations, and it should also be documented like that. In C, this would be
just a 

++
return -(r<0)
--

where r is the return value of the system function, which takes practically
zero additional time compared to what fputs itself costs. 


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