safe_close() automatically becomes a NOP when a negative fd is passed,
and returns -1 unconditionally. This makes it easy to write lines like
this:
fd = safe_close(fd);
Which will close an fd if it is open, and reset the fd variable
correctly.
By making use of this new scheme we can drop a > 200 lines of code that
was required to test for non-negative fds or to reset the closed fd
variable afterwards.
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