Subject: Re: 27.0.50; Calling `par' via shell-command-on-region always errors out

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2019 10:05:44 -0800

On 1/23/19 9:37 AM, Kaushal Modi wrote:
> I ran:
>
> strace -o /tmp/par.tr <http://par.tr> par, and
> strace -o /tmp/emacs.tr <http://emacs.tr> emacs -Q
>
> Looking at the .tr files, they could possibly contain work sensitive 
> data. So I am not sure if I should share those files publicly.

We care about the I/O requests involving the text you're reformatting, 
so I suggest running 'par' on some innocuous text and just looking at 
the associated syscalls (assuming you can reproduce the problem).

Also, please try running the shell command 'fmt' on the same text, to 
see if that can reproduce the problem. If it doesn't reproduce the 
problem, see how fmt's system calls differ from par's. I mention 'fmt' 
because it's similar to 'par' and I can easily run 'fmt' here.

> [ So the problem, as you guessed, seems to be with my OS (RHEL 6.8) .. 
> But why only `par`? hmm ]
Wow, that's older than even the most-ancient RHEL host I have ready 
access to (RHEL 6.10). I could not reproduce the problem on that host, 
using 'fmt'.