A Software Bug

Today I thought of that version cum configuration control system ("ShapeTools") with Makefile-like input files I had the pleasure to work on 20+ years ago.

One user, a co-student of mine, came whining (again!) about some alleged bug in the "shape" program that had allegedly deleted his (alleged) source files. No way, we said.

No, it didn't. It only tended to skip the very last character of the Shapefile. Which didn't do any harm (ever), because that (always) was a newline character, right?

clean:
        rm -f core *.o $(PROGRAM) #*# *~

(For totally unrelated reasons, I implemented a new Shapefile parser not long after that bug report. And I still never end a "clean" rule in a Makefile with "*~".)