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User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686)

Description of problem:
When rcp'ing a file to /dev/null, an error is caused because the devfs
implementation of /dev/null doesn't seem to allow ftruncate() to be called
on it.  rcp calls ftruncate() after the end of a transfer (on the
receiver).  This was never a problem before using a non-devfs /dev/null. 

Our batch queueing software copies the stdout and stderr files back to the
submitting host using rcp.  Many of our scripts copy these to /dev/null
when they are not needed.  Hence the problem.  Because an error is thrown,
there is a delay of ~30 at the end of every batch job.

As a quick fix, I modified rcp.c and recompiled. This worked but I'm
guessing it would be better to fix devfs to allow ftruncate calls. 



How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
[pedretti@foo ~]$ rcp filename foo:/dev/null




	

Actual Results:  rcp: can't truncate /dev/null: Permission denied

Expected Results:  No error messages

Additional info:

My fix, beginning line 883 in rcp.c:

if (ftruncate(ofd, size)) {
    /* fix to avoid calling ftruncate() on /dev/null */
    if (strncmp(np, "/dev/null", 9) != 0) {
        error("rcp: can't truncate %s: %s\n", 
            np, strerror(errno));
            wrerr = DISPLAYED;
    }
}