From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2003-09-19T03:15:15+09:00
Subject: Re: closing stderr

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 02:18:35AM +0900, Michael Garriss wrote:
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >Note that you have to assign something open to $stderr before assigning
> >to STDERR, or else the assignment to STDERR throws an exception trying to
> >print the "already initialized constant" warning and the assignment
> >doesn't complete.  There is probably a cleaner way of doing this.
> 
> Assign something open?  I don't understand.  I get a syntax error on 
> that assignment:

What I mean is that this assignment:

	STDERR = blah

Generates a warning:

	warning: already initialized constant STDERR

And that warning message is sent to - where else - $stderr.
Which means if $stderr is still pointing to a closed File object
at the time you try to assign to STDERR, Ruby tries to send the
warning about the assignment, fails to do so because $stderr is
closed, and aborts the assignment.  

(It seems odd that failure to emit a warning would itself be fatal
to the surrounding operation, but that's the behavior I'm seeing
on final 1.8.0)

> bin/ruglyctl:132:in `require': 
> /usr/www/apache/rugly/lib/rdb_rugly.rb:40: dynamic constant assignment 
> (SyntaxError)
>  STDERR = $stderr

Hm, I'm not sure what that means.  Is this running in mod_ruby?

-Mark