GNU bug report logs - #61300
wc -c doesn't advance stdin position when it's a regular file

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Stephane Chazelas <stephane <at> chazelas.org>, Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 61300 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#61300: wc -c doesn't advance stdin position when it's a regular file
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2023 19:38:24 +0000

On 06/02/2023 06:27, Stephane Chazelas wrote:
> On 2023-02-05 20:59, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> On 2023-02-05 11:59, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> [...]
>> Let's leave that as-is, please. If 'wc' can output the correct value
>> without reading its input, POSIX does not require 'wc' to do the read,
>> and it seems perverse to modify 'wc' to go to the effort to refuse to
>> tell the user useful information that the user requested and that 'wc'
>> knows.
> [...]
> 
> But while I would agree it's very unlikely to ever be hit in practice,
> as I can't think of any reason why one would call wc with its input not
> input for reading, wc is meant to report how many bytes it has read, not
> the size of its input (though POSIX seems ambiguous on that).
> 
> See also (with Pádraig's patch applied):
> 
> $ { echo test > file; wc -c; echo test2 >&0; cat file; } 0> file
> 5
> test
> test2
> 
> wc has lseek()ed to the end of the file even though it was opened in
> write-only mode. Compare with:
> 
> $ { echo test > file; wc -lc; echo test2 >&0; cat file; } 0> file
> wc: 'standard input': Bad file descriptor
> 0 0
> test2

Some more thoughts on this.

Note the orig thread with motivation for the st_size optimization is at:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2016-03/msg00020.html
Note also wc -c has had an st_size optimization for all sizes
since the very first coreutils implementation.

A similar edge case to Stehpane's above is also seen when doing
the lseek(near_end)+read() method, as shown by:

  ${ truncate -s 32768 file; wc -c; wc -c; } 0> file
  wc: 'standard input': Bad file descriptor
  28679
  wc: 'standard input': Bad file descriptor
  0

One possible solution is avoid the above issue is:

  start_pos=lseek(0,SEEK_CUR);
  bytes += lseek(near_end)
  while (read())
    {
      if (did_lseek && read error == EBADF|EINVAL)
        lseek(start_pos); did_lseek=false; bytes=0; continue;
    }

That would also fix an issue I saw for one file in /sys, where:
  /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/rom
  st_size = 131072, available bytes = 0, wc -c = 127007 (EINVAL)

Doing that method for all file sizes rather than just using st_size,
would work but also penalize perf for the common case.
Consider cached stats on a network file system for example.
So I guess in addition to be able to keep the st_size optimization
with stdin, consistent with other cases we could verify/restrict
to readable also.

Note this is only an issue for stdin. Files specified on the command line
and explicitly opened, should get a permission error at that stage.

Note also if you really want to read, you can always `cat | wc -c`
rather than just `wc -c`, so I'm still not sure we should
add the readable restriction for stdin, but I'm not very against it
at least since it is such an edge case.

cheers,
Pádraig

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