Bug 1202753

Present also on RHEL7

Version-Release number of selected component:
rpm-4.11.1-25.el7

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1139805 +++

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1139444 +++

Description of problem:

If stdout is being redirected to a file, and the filesystem is full, rpm will silently fail despite write() returning -ENOSPC

<much snippage from strace>
write(1, "grep-2.18-1.fc20.x86_64\n", 24) = -1 ENOSPC (No space left on device)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

rpm-4.11.2-2.fc20.x86_64

How reproducible: 100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make a filesystem, fill it up (I used a small loopback filesystem to reproduce)
2. rpm -qa > testfile
3. Watch the file either not have all of the expected output (i.e. writes succeeded prior to -ENOSPC) or be 0 bytes

rpm should inform the user about the error, as other utilities do. For example:

$ id  > /mnt/test/test14
id: write error: No space left on device

--- Additional comment from Jon Stanley on 2014-09-08 19:04:50 EDT ---

Forgot to list the actual problematic sequence of commands, but you could probably figure it out. But for completeness sake:

$ rpm -qa > /mnt/test/test15 ; echo $?
0
$ ls -l /mnt/test/test15
-rw-rw-r--. 1 jstanley jstanley 0 Sep  8 19:02 /mnt/test/test15

--- Additional comment from Panu Matilainen on 2014-09-09 06:25:23 EDT ---

Yup... from the rpm logging function:

    (void) fputs(rpmlogLevelPrefix(rec->pri), msgout);

    (void) fputs(rec->message, msgout);
    (void) fflush(msgout);

These go back 14 years almost to date, the (void) warning silencers are half a year younger so its not exactly a new bug :) Thanks for reporting though.

--- Additional comment from Panu Matilainen on 2014-09-09 06:40:31 EDT ---

Just FWIW, rpmlog() does not return an error code, so without API-changes this is fixable only to the extent of logging an error from the logger function ... unless the error came from writing to stderr, in which case reporting an error is going to be a bit difficult anyway.

--- Additional comment from Jon Stanley on 2014-09-09 11:19:13 EDT ---

Hmm, if I'm reading this correctly that means that there's no way for the rpm command to exit with a non-zero exit code without API changes?