>>>>> "B" == Bill Kelly <billk / cts.com> writes:

B> for instance, if the above were in a loop.  Would it be possible to
B> run out of file handles before GC was called?

 no,

B> If so, I would personally find myself resistant to adopting the
B> idiom of letting GC close file handles, as I would view the
B> relationship between the opener of the handles, and GC, as a
B> potential race condition lurking in my code. . . . But it could be
B> I worry too much. :)

 Well, you must know that some persons like me are stupid and forget to
 close the files and I frequently write

pigeon% cat b.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'bz2'

a = File.new("aa", "w")
bz2 = BZ2::Writer.new(a)
12.times {|i| bz2.puts i }
pigeon% 

pigeon% b.rb
pigeon% 

pigeon% bunzip2 < aa
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
pigeon% 


 If the file is not automatically closed, I will lost many data :-)))



Guy Decoux