This may be perfect storm of Dave-centric oddness.

  • I use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (which I have to update one day this fall) and run Visual Studio Code as my main editor within
  • I use Samba to mount several remote file systems, including one on a research cluster which olds my directory there
  • I am doing work with TORQUE to queue tasks that do something that isn’t really the topic of this post. Maybe later?

If you give the queue submission script a string with the -N flag, it puts your output from STDOUT -n into string.oUNIQUENUMBER and STDERR into string.eUNIQUENUMBER.

In a very specific case, I am running qsub -N 2551 ./p2f.sh (with all sorts of other flags that do not help the story), generating 2551.e1280822 and 2551.o1280822. And since I ran it in my development directory, /home/jacoby/mnt/djacoby/dev/project2fortress from my desktop, that’s where the files ended up.

When I run code -n 2551*, the editor opens up 2551.o1280822 just perfectly, but instead of 2551.e1280822, it opens Infinity.

Infinity

This does not happen in /home/jacoby/ or /home/jacoby/mnt/djacoby, just the dev/project2fortress directory.

(/home/jacoby/mnt/djacoby/ is a symlink to /mount/djacoby, because find doesn’t jump symlinks but it does follow mount points.)

My suspicion is based on knowing that Code is an Electron app, build with HTML and JavaScript and running in Chrome. I think it is reading 2551.e1280822 as 2551 time 10 to the power of 1280822, which is so big that JS gives up and says “Infinity”, and I have no idea if it’s because it’s so deep into that path or what.

My next questions: What triggers Code to treat filenames as huge numbers? Is this such an obscure and specific problem that nobody else will find it? Should I report this as a bug?

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to hear it. Ask me on Twitter or make an issue on my blog repo.