… are pretty much unhandled in most applications, just like out of memory conditions. I wouldn’t be surprised if some applications can also trash their data files when running into an OOM during writing.

Some bug squashing parties ago I was working on xchat bug #147832 (xchat: loses server list if disk fills up). I remember that xchat was pretty much nowhere handling out of diskspace, and it has several places where it would write files. There is a bug open on sourceforge about losing user commands the same way. (but the server list is probably written more often?)

Anyway, our applications, especially those written in C, are highly vulnerable to data loss if there is not enough diskspace left. We really need a library to write these files and pay attention to the error codes.

(This post was triggered by the diskspace issues of wiki.debian.org and a followup post by joey hess)