I remember reading about this one years ago. A lovely bug, worthy of being used as a teaching example of how simple flaws in complex chains of processes can produce apparently impossible bugs.
tl;dr: something in cups uses the file utility to identify the file type; there was a bad pattern in file’s magic database that mis-identified a postscript file containing a creation date of “Tue …” as an Erlang JAM file, so cups refused to print it.
aengelke | 16 hours ago
Reminded me of the case of the 500-mile email (2002).
taschmex | 10 hours ago
Both of these are also on The Cursed Computer Iceberg, https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/
hoistbypetard | 7 hours ago
That's excellent. Thank you for sharing it. I was aware of some but not all of the stories on there.
coby | 12 hours ago
A classic. Probably my favorite bug ever :D
sny | 11 hours ago
There's even more of these if you follow the more such crazy stories link at the bottom of the page!
gerikson | 16 hours ago
Submission is dated 2023, references an entry in a mailing list from 2009, which points to a bug filed in 2003.
rainbow_bird | 14 hours ago
I remember reading about this one years ago. A lovely bug, worthy of being used as a teaching example of how simple flaws in complex chains of processes can produce apparently impossible bugs.
ryan-duve | 10 hours ago
On what part of the stack between OpenOffice and a printer is something running Erlang?
fanf | 9 hours ago
Nothing is running Erlang :-) see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
tl;dr: something in cups uses the file utility to identify the file type; there was a bad pattern in file’s magic database that mis-identified a postscript file containing a creation date of “Tue …” as an Erlang JAM file, so cups refused to print it.
ryan-duve | 7 hours ago
Oh! Rereading the article, I'm not sure how I mixed that up. Thanks!
donio | 7 hours ago
The original magic signature with the missing escapes was from the Erlang FAQ:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070614203705/http://www.erlang.org/faq/x779.html#AEN812
Without the escapes everything after "Tue" was considered part of the "message" field that is printed by
filein the identification output.sjamaan | 15 hours ago
Damn, that’s insane