On Thu, 25 Dec 2025, Jason Liu wrote:

Here's what happens:

catalina-vm% cmp -lb portlist.tcl
/opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl
cmp: /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl: Illegal byte
sequence

It looks like the file on my system is hosed to the point where it's not
even recognized as a text file anymore. I can't read the file using vi
either, vi shows an empty buffer with the message:

"portlist.tcl" [readonly][READ ERRORS] 0L, 0B

Interestingly, both the file downloaded from GitHub and the corrupted one
on my system are both exactly 10,041 bytes in size. There's no way to
checksum the files though, since my corrupted file can't be read by
anything, it seems:

catalina-vm% openssl dgst -sha256
/opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl
Read error in /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl
C09D841001000000:error:8000005C:system library:file_read:Illegal byte
sequence:crypto/bio/bss_file.c:148:calling fread()
C09D841001000000:error:10080002:BIO routines:file_read:system
lib:crypto/bio/bss_file.c:150:

All of the above can be explained if you're using filesystem-internal compression (which I believe MacPorts tries to use when available) and the compressed actual on-disk content has been clobbered.

Fred Wright

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