...and write log messages to standard output.
Some versions of fixfiles in 2004 created a logfile by default.
Apparently they also used `tee` to log to standard output at the same time.
We're also told that the logfile was implemented because there was too
much output generated for use on a tty, and it scrolled out of reach.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=131707
In the current version, none of these original reasons for `-l` remain.
The logfile is not created by default. If no log file is specified,
messages are written to stdin [sic]... if and only stdin is a tty. If
stdin is not a tty, the log defaults to /dev/null.
When a user runs fixfiles on a tty and finds there is too much output, she
is likely to try redirecting standard output and/or standard error using
the shell. She will find this doesn't help, because fixfiles is writing
the verbose log messages to standard input.
I tried to fix the problem non-intrusively, by changing the default log
file to `/dev/stdout`. Sadly, this breaks down where you have
`echo >>$LOGFILE "Log message"` inside a specific function, which is run
with output redirected in order to "return" a string value (captured
into a variable). exclude_dirs_from_relabelling() was such a function.
I was trying to abstract over writing to both normal files and stdout, but
my abstraction "leaks" in a non-obvious way.
There is a simple solution. We can write the log messages to standard
output. When we are passed `-l` by a legacy script, we can redirect
standard output to the logfile.
This removes any distinctions between the logfile and "non-log" messages.
Some calls to restorecon were missing redirections to the log file.
"Cleaning out /tmp" was written to the log file, but "Cleaning out labels
on /tmp" was not. There were no comments to explain these distinctions.
8e9c9a20cb