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

  $ echo "added file1" > file1
  $ echo "added file2" > file2
  $ hg add file1 file2
  $ hg commit -m "added file1 and file2"

  $ echo "changed file1" >> file1
  $ hg commit -m "changed file1"

  $ hg -q log
  1:08a16e8e4408
  0:d29c767a4b52
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip

  $ hg update -C 0
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ hg id
  d29c767a4b52
  $ echo "changed file1" >> file1
  $ hg id
  d29c767a4b52+

  $ hg revert --all
  reverting file1
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  d29c767a4b52

  $ hg update
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip

  $ hg update -C 0
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ echo "changed file1" >> file1

  $ hg update
  1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip

  $ hg revert --all
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip

  $ hg revert -r tip --all
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip

  $ hg update -C
  0 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
  $ hg diff
  $ hg status
  ? file1.orig
  $ hg id
  08a16e8e4408 tip