Ignatios Souvatzis <i...@netbsd.org> wrote:
> Definitely O_EXCL and EEXIST, yes. But we still can fall into a hole
> in the sequence, fill it, and skip over the remaining part(s), thus
> interleaving our new and the preexisting files.
Ah, you mean if I currently have
$ ls
xaa xad xae
and then run
$ split -n 4 -c file; ls
xaa xab xac xad xae xaf xag
--- --- --- ---
I don't see a way around that: split(1) would need to
look ahead at _any_ possible file to be able to
determine if the current file name falls into a hole
in the sequence.
If you think it's worth calling out, we could try to
do so in the manual page:
"If the -c flag is specified, split will instead
continue to generate output file names until it finds
one that does not already exist. (Note: this may fill
a "hole" in a pre-existing sequence of files such that
the final list of all output files may end up out of
sequence.)"
?
-Jan
