Re: [Caml-list] Closing all open file descriptors

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Zitat von Dave Benjamin <dave@ramenlabs.com>:

> On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Mattias Engdegård wrote:
>
> >> Probably irrelevant here, but this approach wouldn't work under Windows
> >> (Unix.file_descr is the Win32 file handle at that point which is often
> >> larger than 1024). More relevantly, Unix can be reconfigured to allow for
> >> more than 1024 open files.
> >
> > I think platform-dependent code is required here. The common way of
> > doing this under Linux (and Solaris, probably) is to readdir
> > /proc/PID/fd/. Windows is of course very different.
>
> I like this approach. It doesn't eliminate the need to convert ints to
> descrs,

On Unix, file-descriptors are identified by integer-values.

In OCaml, you have abstract types for file-descriptors.
So, how to convert them? I think, officially there is no way.

But if you like the concept of completely using files,
Plan9 as operating system would make sense to you. :)



> but at least you don't have a bunch of unnecessary system calls or
> a hard-coded maximum

Something like Sys.max_open_fd would be fine,
and I think there should be a way to make it cross-platform-available.



> (assuming getrlimit is unavailable, as it is with
> OCaml currently).

getrlimit seems to be a Unix-only thing.
I don't know if this is also available on other systems, like Windows or so.

So, if it is Unix-specific, this only would make sense in the Unix-modlue.

But something like the maximum number of open files / max-num of
used filedescriptors would also make sense on unix.

So, I would ask for something like a Sys.max_open_fd.
This owuld be a cross-platform thing.


> I wonder if /dev/fd is more or less portable...

Will this be available on non-Unix and non-Linux systems?

You also mentioned Win-systems?
If you also need that portability, you should not look for
Unix-only features.

Ciao,
   Oliver