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.

#!/bin/sh
#
# This is an example of using HGEDITOR to create of diff to review the
# changes while committing.

# If you want to pass your favourite editor some other parameters
# only for Mercurial, modify this:
case "${EDITOR}" in
    "")
        EDITOR="vi"
        ;;
    emacs)
        EDITOR="$EDITOR -nw"
        ;;
    gvim|vim)
        EDITOR="$EDITOR -f -o"
        ;;
esac


HGTMP=""
cleanup_exit() {
    rm -rf "$HGTMP"
}

# Remove temporary files even if we get interrupted
trap "cleanup_exit" 0 # normal exit
trap "exit 255" HUP INT QUIT ABRT TERM

HGTMP=$(mktemp -d ${TMPDIR-/tmp}/hgeditor.XXXXXX)
[ x$HGTMP != x -a -d $HGTMP ] || {
  echo "Could not create temporary directory! Exiting." 1>&2
  exit 1
}

(
    grep '^HG: changed' "$1" | cut -b 13- | while read changed; do
        "$HG" diff "$changed" >> "$HGTMP/diff"
    done
)

cat "$1" > "$HGTMP/msg"

MD5=$(which md5sum 2>/dev/null) || \
    MD5=$(which md5 2>/dev/null)
[ -x "${MD5}" ] && CHECKSUM=`${MD5} "$HGTMP/msg"`
if [ -s "$HGTMP/diff" ]; then
    $EDITOR "$HGTMP/msg" "$HGTMP/diff" || exit $?
else
    $EDITOR "$HGTMP/msg" || exit $?
fi
[ -x "${MD5}" ] && (echo "$CHECKSUM" | ${MD5} -c >/dev/null 2>&1 && exit 13)

mv "$HGTMP/msg" "$1"

exit $?