I am ashamed to say, /dev/null being a regular file was the source of
the problem.
Actually this was one of the very first ideas I had and I tested against
it in multiple ways. I ran:
echo asdf > /dev/null ; cat /dev/null and cat /dev/null
several times, always returning empty. It must have been freak chance. I
mistook the output of "file /dev/null" to name a /dev/null empty device
rather than an empty file of that name. Also this has happened to me a
couple of times before, and in the past it always caused very obvious
problems on the entire system.
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
Best regards,
Mathias
On 1/22/21 3:09 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
On 1/22/21 2:53 AM, Eduardo A. Bustamante López wrote:
- Notice that the value returned by `fstat(0, ...)' indicates that
/dev/null in your system is a *regular* file (it should be
`st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666', but instead it is `st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666'). It
also indicates that its size is 73 bytes (`st_size=73').
- Notice that `cat' reads from file descriptor 0 (i.e. /dev/null),
and the return value is a string of 73 bytes in length.
- `cat' then writes that string out to `./config.status'
73 happens to be the length of the string that has been causing
issues for you:
$ echo "extern void free (void *__ptr) __attribute__ ((__nothrow__
, __leaf__));" | wc -c
73
This is a first-class observation.
