OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays (2009)

A classic bug story recounts how OpenOffice appeared to mysteriously fail to print on Tuesdays. The root cause traced back to the Unix 'file' utility, which uses magic-number patterns to detect file types. OpenOffice embedded a creation date like 'Tue MMM D...' in generated PostScript files, and a malformed pattern for an obscure Erlang JAM file type incorrectly matched the unescaped 'Tue Jan 22...' string, misidentifying PostScript files as JAM files and causing print failures specifically on Tuesdays. The fix involved properly escaping spaces in the pattern definition.

Source: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.