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.
These callsites were identified by applying the next changeset and
then fixing new crashes.