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AnimalMuppettoday at 12:04 AM1 replyview on HN

I worked on a code base that ran on a variety of Unixes. One customer complained about file corruption from our software. Turns out that their Unix setup was... rather unique. Spawned programs were not given a stderr file handle! If you wrote to stderr, it scribbled on whatever file was open on file handle 2.

We, uh, reasoned with the other side - we told them to fix their stupid broken setup.


Replies

anyfootoday at 12:17 AM

Glad you were able to sort it out properly. I guess maybe I'm also lucky to much less rarely work with, shall we say, consultation-resistant engineers than discussion forums sometimes make you believe.