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The open-time flags specify options affecting how open will behave.
These options are not preserved once the file is open. The exception to
this is O_NONBLOCK, which is also an I/O operating mode and so it
is saved. See Opening and Closing Files, for how to call
open.
There are two sorts of options specified by open-time flags.
open looks up the
file name to locate the file, and whether the file can be created.
open will
perform on the file once it is open.
Here are the file name translation flags.
If set, the file will be created if it doesn’t already exist.
If both O_CREAT and O_EXCL are set, then open fails
if the specified file already exists. This is guaranteed to never
clobber an existing file.
The O_EXCL flag has a special meaning in combination with
O_TMPFILE; see below.
If set, the open operation fails if the given name is not the name of
a directory. The errno variable is set to ENOTDIR for
this error condition.
If this flag is specified, functions in the open family create an
unnamed temporary file. In this case, the pathname argument to the
open family of functions (see Opening and Closing Files) is
interpreted as the directory in which the temporary file is created
(thus determining the file system which provides the storage for the
file). The O_TMPFILE flag must be combined with O_WRONLY
or O_RDWR, and the mode argument is required.
The temporary file can later be given a name using linkat,
turning it into a regular file. This allows the atomic creation of a
file with the specific file attributes (mode and extended attributes)
and file contents. If, for security reasons, it is not desirable that a
name can be given to the file, the O_EXCL flag can be specified
along with O_TMPFILE.
Not all kernels support this open flag. If this flag is unsupported, an
attempt to create an unnamed temporary file fails with an error of
EINVAL. If the underlying file system does not support the
O_TMPFILE flag, an EOPNOTSUPP error is the result.
The O_TMPFILE flag is a GNU extension.
This prevents open from blocking for a “long time” to open the
file. This is only meaningful for some kinds of files, usually devices
such as serial ports; when it is not meaningful, it is harmless and
ignored. Often, opening a port to a modem blocks until the modem reports
carrier detection; if O_NONBLOCK is specified, open will
return immediately without a carrier.
Note that the O_NONBLOCK flag is overloaded as both an I/O operating
mode and a file name translation flag. This means that specifying
O_NONBLOCK in open also sets nonblocking I/O mode;
see I/O Operating Modes. To open the file without blocking but do normal
I/O that blocks, you must call open with O_NONBLOCK set and
then call fcntl to turn the bit off.
If the named file is a terminal device, don’t make it the controlling terminal for the process. See Job Control, for information about what it means to be the controlling terminal.
On GNU/Hurd systems and 4.4 BSD, opening a file never makes it the
controlling terminal and O_NOCTTY is zero. However, GNU/Linux systems
and some other systems use a nonzero value for O_NOCTTY and set the
controlling terminal when you open a file that is a terminal device; so
to be portable, use O_NOCTTY when it is important to avoid this.
The following three file name translation flags exist only on GNU/Hurd systems.
Do not recognize the named file as the controlling terminal, even if it refers to the process’s existing controlling terminal device. Operations on the new file descriptor will never induce job control signals. See Job Control.
If the named file is a symbolic link, open the link itself instead of
the file it refers to. (fstat on the new file descriptor will
return the information returned by lstat on the link’s name.)
If the named file is specially translated, do not invoke the translator. Open the bare file the translator itself sees.
The open-time action flags tell open to do additional operations
which are not really related to opening the file. The reason to do them
as part of open instead of in separate calls is that open
can do them atomically.
Truncate the file to zero length. This option is only useful for
regular files, not special files such as directories or FIFOs. POSIX.1
requires that you open the file for writing to use O_TRUNC. In
BSD and GNU you must have permission to write the file to truncate it,
but you need not open for write access.
This is the only open-time action flag specified by POSIX.1. There is
no good reason for truncation to be done by open, instead of by
calling ftruncate afterwards. The O_TRUNC flag existed in
Unix before ftruncate was invented, and is retained for backward
compatibility.
The remaining operating modes are BSD extensions. They exist only on some systems. On other systems, these macros are not defined.
Acquire a shared lock on the file, as with flock.
See File Locks.
If O_CREAT is specified, the locking is done atomically when
creating the file. You are guaranteed that no other process will get
the lock on the new file first.
Acquire an exclusive lock on the file, as with flock.
See File Locks. This is atomic like O_SHLOCK.
Next: I/O Operating Modes, Previous: File Access Modes, Up: File Status Flags [Contents][Index]