deletion of output files

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich at novell dot com>]

Other than gcc, all binutils utilities (or at least all I checked)
carelessly delete their supposed output file on various error
conditions, no matter whether this is a regular file or something else.
Is this intended behavior? This is especially annoying when running some
installation script (obviously as root in almost all cases) which tests
functionality of one of these utilities (perhaps just because the script
does so in all modes of operation) and thus directs the output to
/dev/null.

If this is something that is deemed to need correction, then if I
wanted to prepare a patch I'd want to put the functionality in a single
place (rather than in each utility). The question, however, would be
what the right place would be: libiberty doesn't formally belong to
binutils (and thus seems a bad candidate) and bfd shouldn't normally be
concerned with non-bfd operations (and even if to be placed there, I'm
uncertain whether gas in non-BFD_ASSEMBLER mode actually may link
against libbfd).

Thanks, Jan