posix: always seek to EOF when opening a file in append mode Python 3 already does this, so skip it there. Consider the program: #include <stdio.h> int main() { FILE *f = fopen("narf", "w"); fprintf(f, "narf\n"); fclose(f); f = fopen("narf", "a"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); fprintf(f, "troz\n"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); return 0; } on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux with glibc, this program prints 5 10 but on musl libc (Alpine Linux and probably others) this prints 0 10 By my reading of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fopen.html this is technically correct, specifically: > Opening a file with append mode (a as the first character in the > mode argument) shall cause all subsequent writes to the file to be > forced to the then current end-of-file, regardless of intervening > calls to fseek(). in other words, the file position doesn't really matter in append-mode files, and we can't depend on it being at all meaningful unless we perform a seek() before tell() after open(..., 'a'). Experimentally after a .write() we can do a .tell() and it'll always be reasonable, but I'm unclear from reading the specification if that's a smart thing to rely on. This matches what we do on Windows and what Python 3 does for free, so let's just be consistent. Thanks to Yuya for the idea.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# mercurial - scalable distributed SCM
#
# Copyright 2005-2007 Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
#
# This software may be used and distributed according to the terms of the
# GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.
from __future__ import absolute_import

import os
import sys

if os.environ.get('HGUNICODEPEDANTRY', False):
    try:
        reload(sys)
        sys.setdefaultencoding("undefined")
    except NameError:
        pass

libdir = '@LIBDIR@'

if libdir != '@' 'LIBDIR' '@':
    if not os.path.isabs(libdir):
        libdir = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)),
                              libdir)
        libdir = os.path.abspath(libdir)
    sys.path.insert(0, libdir)

from hgdemandimport import tracing
with tracing.log('hg script'):
    # enable importing on demand to reduce startup time
    try:
        if sys.version_info[0] < 3 or sys.version_info >= (3, 6):
            import hgdemandimport; hgdemandimport.enable()
    except ImportError:
        sys.stderr.write("abort: couldn't find mercurial libraries in [%s]\n" %
                         ' '.join(sys.path))
        sys.stderr.write("(check your install and PYTHONPATH)\n")
        sys.exit(-1)

    from mercurial import dispatch
    dispatch.run()