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.

  $ hg init

  $ mkdir alpha
  $ touch alpha/one
  $ mkdir beta
  $ touch beta/two

  $ hg add alpha/one beta/two
  $ hg ci -m "start"

  $ echo 1 > alpha/one
  $ echo 2 > beta/two

everything

  $ hg diff --nodates
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 alpha/one
  --- a/alpha/one
  +++ b/alpha/one
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +1
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 beta/two
  --- a/beta/two
  +++ b/beta/two
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +2

beta only

  $ hg diff --nodates beta
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 beta/two
  --- a/beta/two
  +++ b/beta/two
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +2

inside beta

  $ cd beta
  $ hg diff --nodates .
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 beta/two
  --- a/beta/two
  +++ b/beta/two
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +2

relative to beta

  $ cd ..
  $ hg diff --nodates --root beta
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 two
  --- a/two
  +++ b/two
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +2

inside beta

  $ cd beta
  $ hg diff --nodates --root .
  diff -r 7d5ef1aea329 two
  --- a/two
  +++ b/two
  @@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
  +2

  $ cd ..