I've noticed that updatedb has consistently failed since upgrading to findutils 4.6.0. I'm using IRIX 6.5.30 and the mipspro compilers.
It turns out that frcode assumes that a write error has occurred, although in reality everything went well, because putc(-1, stdout) returns -1 on success _and_ failure, since EOF == -1, and therefore in frcode.c, line 335: if (EOF == putc (diffcount, stdout)) exits with "write error". I'm not sure why this isn't always triggered if (diffcount == -1), but I haven't checked if the same codepath is always taken. A possible fix would be to cast diffcount to unsigned char, this appears to work (and results in a valid locatedb) on both linux and irix: putc ((unsigned char)diffcount, stdout)) The filenames and diffcounts leading to the error were e.g. diffcount 'old' - 'new' [...] 1 '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimpoffsetarea.h' - '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimpoldwidgets.h' -1 '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimpoldwidgets.h' - '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimppageselector.h' 2 '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimppageselector.h' - '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimppatheditor.h' -1 '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimppatheditor.h' - '/usr/nekoware/include/gimp-2.0/libgimpwidgets/gimppickbutton.h' 'Error 0' diffcount: -1 /usr/nekoware/libexec/frcode: write error Failed to generate /usr/nekoware/var/locatedb.n rainer
