I agree it is not a big thing at all, zero not
returning any error. Yes! I read and understood the
MAY return an error, it makes complete sense.

I agree, the Linux man pages need a lot of work,
if they are going to be even close to reflecting
some of things in the kernel.


Thanks,
Balbir

--- Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> Jim Hollenback wrote:
> 
> > According to readv(2) EINVAL is returned for an
> invalid
> > argument.
> 
> Right.
> 
> > The examples given were count might be greater
> than
> > MAX_IOVEC or zero.
> 
> Wrong, or at least confusingly phrased.
> 
> 
> In the good old days, a man page described what the
> system did,
> and the ERRORS section gave the reasons for the
> possible error
> returns.
> These days a man page describes a function present
> on many
> Unix-like systems, and not all systems have
> precisely the
> same behaviour. POSIX man pages therefore
> distinguish under
> ERRORS the two possibilities "if foo then this error
> must be
> returned", and "if foo then this error may be
> returned".
> 
> Linux man pages do not (yet) make this distinction -
> adding this is a lot of careful work, and so far
> nobody is doing this [hint..].
> In other words, the ERRORS section in Linux man
> pages is
> to be interpreted as "if foo then this error may be
> returned".
> 
> Note that it may not be desirable at all to do
> things that way,
> there is no need for kernel patches, it just means
> that systems
> exist with this behaviour, so that authors of
> portable programs
> must take this into account.
> 
> Balbir Singh wrote:
> 
> > Apply this trivial patch, if you want the required
> behaviour
> 
> But the behaviour is not required.
> Paul Larson makes the same mistake.
> 
> Andries


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