portlist.tcl: illegal byte sequence

[Fred Wright]

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