iCloud Silently Evicted 69 Article Files and Killed 4 Days of Publishing: EDEADLK and a read_text_resilient Design
Every one of my publishing lanes went dark for four days, and every script involved exited with status 0. Nothing had crashed. The files themselves had quietly stopped existing on disk — macOS had uploaded them to iCloud and deleted the local copies to "optimize storage." Why This Matters What it means for automation to depend on its environment When you run 160+ launchd jobs around the clock,…
For four days, every automated publishing script for a blog stopped working. The issue was with the files that were quietly uploaded to iCloud and deleted from local storage to optimize storage. The scripts failed with a Resource deadlock error, which occurs when the data is not available locally. This happened on August 6, 2026, and resulted in 69 article files being in a "dataless" state on the Desktop.
Despite the scripts returning exit 0, there were no visible errors, so the issue went unnoticed. The solution was to move the automation's read/write targets out of the Desktop/Documents folder. This involved moving the article files to a different location and updating the path constants in the scripts. Additionally, a function called read_text_resilient was created to wrap the code that reads from the Desktop or Documents folder and retry the operation if an EDEADLK or EAGAIN error occurs.
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