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.

#require execbit

  $ hg init
  $ echo a > a
  $ hg ci -Am'not executable'
  adding a

  $ chmod +x a
  $ hg ci -m'executable'
  $ hg id
  79abf14474dc tip

Make sure we notice the change of mode if the cached size == -1:

  $ hg rm a
  $ hg revert -r 0 a
  $ hg debugstate
  n   0         -1 unset               a
  $ hg status
  M a

  $ hg up 0
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ hg id
  d69afc33ff8a
  $ test -x a && echo executable -- bad || echo not executable -- good
  not executable -- good