posix: always seek to EOF when opening a file in append mode
Python 3 already does this, so skip it there.
Consider the program:
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
FILE *f = fopen("narf", "w");
fprintf(f, "narf\n");
fclose(f);
f = fopen("narf", "a");
printf("%ld\n", ftell(f));
fprintf(f, "troz\n");
printf("%ld\n", ftell(f));
return 0;
}
on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux with glibc, this program prints
5
10
but on musl libc (Alpine Linux and probably others) this prints
0
10
By my reading of
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fopen.html
this is technically correct, specifically:
> Opening a file with append mode (a as the first character in the
> mode argument) shall cause all subsequent writes to the file to be
> forced to the then current end-of-file, regardless of intervening
> calls to fseek().
in other words, the file position doesn't really matter in append-mode
files, and we can't depend on it being at all meaningful unless we
perform a seek() before tell() after open(..., 'a'). Experimentally
after a .write() we can do a .tell() and it'll always be reasonable,
but I'm unclear from reading the specification if that's a smart thing
to rely on. This matches what we do on Windows and what Python 3 does
for free, so let's just be consistent. Thanks to Yuya for the idea.
[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]
Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>