What is a good programming pattern for handling return values from stdio file writing functions

Question

I\'m working on some code that generates a lot of

ignoring return value of ‘size_t fwrite(const void*, size_t, size_t, FILE*)’, declared with attribute warn         


        

Answer 1

The poor man's C exception handling based on goto (in fact, the one and only instance of goto NOT being harmful):

int foo() {
    FILE * fp = fopen(...);
    ....

    /* Note: fwrite returns the number of elements written, not bytes! */
    if (fwrite (&blah, sizeof (blah), 1, fp) != 1) goto error1;

    ...

    if (fwrite (&foo, sizeof (foo), 1, fp) != 1) goto error2;

    ...

ok:
    /* Everything went fine */
    fclose(fp);
    return 0;

error1:
    /* Error case 1 */
    fclose(fp);
    return -1;

error2:
    /* Error case 2 */
    fclose(fp);
    return -2;
}

You get the idea. Restructure as you wish (single/multiple returns, single cleanup, custom error messages, etc.). From my experience this is the most common C error handling pattern out there. The crucial point is: NEVER, EVER ignore stdlib return codes, and any good reason to do so (e.g. readability) is not good enough.