Is O_NONBLOCK being set a property of the file descriptor or underlying file?

Question

From what I have been reading on The Open Group website on fcntl, open, read, and write, I get the impression that whether O_NONBLOCK is set on a file descriptor, and hence whether non-blocking I/O is used with the descriptor, should be a property of that file descriptor rather than the underlying file. Being a property of the file descriptor means, for example, that if I duplicate a file descriptor or open another descriptor to the same file, then I can use blocking I/O with one and non-blocking I/O with the other.

Experimenting with a FIFO, however, it appears that it is not possible to have a blocking I/O descriptor and non-blocking I/O descriptor to the FIFO simultaneously (so whether O_NONBLOCK is set is a property of the underlying file [the FIFO]):

#include <errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int fds[2];
    if (pipe(fds) == -1) {
        fprintf(stderr, "`pipe` failed.\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    int fd0_dup = dup(fds[0]);
    if (fd0_dup <= STDERR_FILENO) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to duplicate the read end\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if (fds[0] == fd0_dup) {
        fprintf(stderr, "`fds[0]` should not equal `fd0_dup`.\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if ((fcntl(fds[0], F_GETFL) & O_NONBLOCK)) {
        fprintf(stderr, "`fds[0]` should not have `O_NONBLOCK` set.\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if (fcntl(fd0_dup, F_SETFL, fcntl(fd0_dup, F_GETFL) | O_NONBLOCK) == -1) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to set `O_NONBLOCK` on `fd0_dup`\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if ((fcntl(fds[0], F_GETFL) & O_NONBLOCK)) {
        fprintf(stderr, "`fds[0]` should still have `O_NONBLOCK` unset.\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE; // RETURNS HERE
    }

    char buf[1];
    if (read(fd0_dup, buf, 1) != -1) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Expected `read` on `fd0_dup` to fail immediately\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }
    else if (errno != EAGAIN) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Expected `errno` to be `EAGAIN`\n");
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This leaves me thinking: is it ever possible to have a non-blocking I/O descriptor and blocking I/O descriptor to the same file and if so, does it depend on the type of file (regular file, FIFO, block special file, character special file, socket, etc.)?

Answer 1

O_NONBLOCK is a property of the open file description, not of the file descriptor, nor of the underlying file.

Yes, you could have separate file descriptors open for the same file, one of which is blocking and the other of which is non-blocking.

You need to distinguish between a FIFO (created using mkfifo()) and a pipe (created using pipe()).

Note that the blocking status is a property of the 'open file description', but in the simplest cases, there is a one-to-one mapping between file descriptors and open file descriptions. The open() function call creates a new open file description and a new file descriptor that refers to the open file description.

When you use dup(), you have two file descriptors sharing one open file description, and the properties belong to the open file description. The description of fcntl() says that F_SETFL affects the open file description associated with the file descriptor. Note that lseek() adjusts the file position of the open file description associated with the file descriptor - so it affects other file descriptors duplicated from the original one.

Removing the error handling from your code to reduce it, you have:

int fds[2];
pipe(fds);
int fd0_dup = dup(fds[0]);
fcntl(fd0_dup, F_SETFL, fcntl(fd0_dup, F_GETFL) | O_NONBLOCK);

Now both fd0_dup and fds[0] refer to the same open file description (because of the dup()), so the fcntl() operation affected both file descriptors.

if ((fcntl(fds[0], F_GETFL) & O_NONBLOCK)) { ... }

Hence the observed behaviour here is required by POSIX.