Today’s xkcd riffs a common frustration about busy files: programs that can’t do their intended operations on them rarely (if ever) specify the file that’s busy or tell the user which programs are using the file — and without that knowledge, the user can’t fix the problem.

There are tools that can help you discover those things, as I describe using ten years ago, but I’d already been running into EBUSY problems for ten years by then, and the old guard before me for another ten years beyond that. Why haven’t things improved?

Sometimes file_operation(filename) fails — hey, this happens, busy files are a thing, ain’t nothing your program can do about that. But report to the user that file_operation on filename failed for reason strerror(errno)! Not reporting the filename is just sloppy programming.

It’s not like the tools have gotten any better. What, you think it’s acceptable to make the user trace your program, looking through a haystack of every system call to find the needle which is the program’s critical failure? Is that work you’re putting on the user’s shoulders less than sticking the filename in the error message? This has sucked for two generations now. Please help making it suck less.