[screen-devel] /tmp/screens race

[Richard Kojedzinszky]

Dear devs,

I am a happy screen user, but noticed a race condition, the /tmp/screens 
directory creation. And this makes our services unavailable in the 
following situation:

Our unix user accounts for different services have a @reboot entry in 
their crontabs, but as cron starts this entries paralell upon boot, I 
eventually got some screen instances not starting, and the corresponding 
error message is sent by cron, stating that /tmp/screens already exists.

It seems that first a check is made for existence of that dir, and if 
missing, then it is created. In my opinion, an mkdir() could be always 
called instead stat() and mkdir(), as it implicitly checks the existence, 
actually does no harm at all, and the result is the same.

Regards,
Kojedzinszky Richard