Are write sys calls in Linux atomic?
There are a few situations I am curious about learning:
-
Partial writes: If I were to invoke the
write(fd, buf, nbytes)
syscall, is it possible for only part of the buffer to be written to disk. Suppose the return ofwrite
isnbytes
which is the same argument passed in, could an inconvenient sudden power loss at the moment of invocation ofwrite()
only allow for lesser than nbytes to be written to the disk? -
If I were to write “This is a cat.” in one invocation to write() and “That is a dog.” in another invocation to write() in a different process to the same file, in what situations could I end up with interleaved output.
-
File appends are supposed to be atomic across concurrent processes if I open in append mode and write lesser than
PIPE_BUF
bytes per invocation towrite()
. What about atomicity wrt partial writes. Let us say I have one process writing lesser than PIPE_BUF bytes to a file with one invocation to write(). Could a partial write still occur with the loss of power?
There are some related questions but they don’t provide the full context:
- What happens if a write system call is called on same file by 2 different processes simultaneously
- How to safely write to a file?