Re: Bug in od with "-j" option?

[Paul Eggert]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> +          If the number of bytes left to skip is larger than
> +          the size of the current file, we can decrement
> +          n_skip and go on to the next file.  */
>         if (S_ISREG (file_stats.st_mode) && 0 <= file_stats.st_size)

An idle thought.  Given the problems we've had elsewhere with /proc
files that claim to be regular files of size zero, perhaps the above
line should be changed to the following?

          if (S_ISREG (file_stats.st_mode) && 0 < file_stats.st_size)

More generally, the idea is that if a file claims to be a regular file
of size zero, then GNU utilities should not attempt to do
optimizations based on the assumption that the file is empty, but
should go ahead and try to actually read the file.  It's kind of a
pain to treat size-zero files specially, but there it is.