[TECH] SafeRead and SafeWrite

'read' and 'write' are most frequently used system calls, its really a blunder to have something like the following in the code.

/*Read and Write blunders*/
if(read(fd,buffer,len) < 0 ){
  perror("Read ERROR:");
}

if(write(fd,buffer,len) < 0){
  perror("Write ERROR:");
}

The above code involving 'read' and 'write' syscalls may seem perfectly fine but unfortunately thats not true, NEVER IGNORE THE RETURN VALUE of a syscall, its very common to functions like 'read' and 'write' to return values less than 'len' in several situations like program interrupted by a signal or timeout or if the 'len' is very large say in 'Mb' make sure you have the following 'SafeRead' and 'SafeWrite' in your coding libraries.

ssize_t SafeWrite(int fd,void *buf,size_t wlen){
 ssize_t len; char *bbuf = (char *)buf;
 size_t writeln=0;
 while(writeln < wlen){
   len = write(fd,&(bbuf[writeln]),wlen-writeln);
   if(len<=0) return len;
   writeln += len;
 }
 return writeln;
}

ssize_t SafeRead(int fd,void *buf,size_t rlen){
 ssize_t len;char *bbuf = (char *)buf;
 size_t readln=0;
 while(readln < rlen){
   len = read(fd,&(bbuf[readln]),rlen-readln);
   if(len<=0) return len;
   readln += len;
 }
 return readln;
}

Its quite often that the while loop only executes once, but its always possible that due to some reason the 'read' and 'write' syscalls may return less than the number of bytes you read or write.