BUGS

# $Id: BUGS,v 1.6 2004/11/01 00:02:49 ianmacd Exp $

Known issues with acoc
----------------------

- Interactive programs do not work well with acoc.

  This includes things like 'make config' when building a kernel on Linux,
  Ruby's interactive interpreter (irb) and others. This is due to the fact
  that acoc's output is line-buffered.

- TkDiff displays error messages when calling diff via acoc.

- curses based programs don't always work correctly, such as mtr.

- Programs that expect to output to a tty may act oddly when called by acoc in
  its default mode, since their output is first passed through a pipe to acoc
  and only then sent to stdout.

  ls, for example, formats its basic output as a single column if it detects
  that it is not outputting to a tty, so the output of 'ls' will be the same
  as for 'ls -1' when called via acoc in its default mode.

  The /p program flag was added to acoc 0.3.0 to circumvent this problem.

- A similar problem used to occur when acoc was invoked via a symlink and
  acoc's stdout was not a tty.

  Consider the following line of code from /etc/bashrc on a Red Hat Linux
  system:

    if [ "`id -gn`" = "`id -un`" -a `id -u` -gt 99 ]; then

  If id(1) is symlinked to acoc and acoc adds ANSI colour codes to id's
  output, the backticks in the above three invocations of id will capture the
  colour codes along with the normal output, causing the comparison to fail
  with an error.

  For this reason, the default behaviour of acoc as of version 0.2.5 is to
  leave command output unaltered if stdout is not a tty. This can be
  overridden by specifying the /t flag on a 'program_spec'.


If you encounter one of the above problems while invoking a program via a
symlink to acoc and need to avoid running the program through acoc on this
particular occasion, call the program using its full path to ensure that acoc
is bypassed, e.g.

$ /usr/bin/make config

instead of:

$ make config

If the program is called indirectly, such as diff being called by TkDiff,
circumvent the calling of diff via acoc by passing your program an explicit
path that omits /usr/acoc/bin, e.g.

$ PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin tkdiff file1 file2

Then, the /usr/acoc/bin/diff symlink will not be found when TkDiff invokes
diff.