Front Page (inb4 what's that?) WTF
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A Select System Call
Way back in the 90s, in an era when Swedish pop bands were getting regular US radio play and CVS was the optimal source control system, Alan worked on a remote-execution service for a “Unix-like” OS. One of his co-workers had just left the company, and Alan needed to track down a bug in a module...
The code being criticised:
nsel = select(max(pty_fd, net_fd), &rdset, NULL, NULL, NULL);The criticism:
At a glance, this code just looks wrong. The first parameter to select is the number of file descriptors. Passing max(pty_fd, net_fd) implies that we’re passing whichever file descriptor just happens to be the larger number, which makes no sense.
Except, from the link provided on that self-same page:
nfds [the parameter under considerationhere - ed] should be set to the highest-numbered file descriptor in any of the three sets, plus 1. The indicated file descriptors in each set are checked, up to this limit (but see BUGS).
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Isn't really the first time Remy failed his research and committed a
inside an article. Nothing to see here 
