Issue

• Why fdisk -l reports too many open files if the devices exist default open file limit?

• It's been noticed that on RHEL systems with a large number of disks(more than default limit 1024 in general) presented, the number of disks shown by fdisk|sfdisk -l is subject to the maximum open filehandle limit.

• Further analysis with strace reveals that the commands appear to be failing to properly close filehandles as they work through /proc/partitions, thereby causing the open filehandle limit to be reached and the subsequent attempts to process any additional partitions fail silently.

Would the correct behaviour not be for these commands to :

a) Correctly close down filehandles as it processes the partition list?
b) Pass on the 'too many open files' error to the terminal?