OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays

An intriguing bug was reported regarding OpenOffice's printing issues, particularly on Tuesdays. A blogger mentioned that his wife had been complaining about the inability to print on Tuesdays, leading others to initially suspect an OpenOffice problem. However, it soon became apparent that the issue was more complex than that.

One user resolved the issue by removing and reinstalling OpenOffice on a Thursday. However, two weeks later, the problem resurfaced on a Tuesday, indicating that the solution was not a permanent fix. This scenario repeated nearly four months later when a wife of an Ubuntu hacker reported the same issue. The husband humorously suggested that the printer was "on its day off" on Tuesdays, but his wife insisted that the problem persisted.

The root cause of the problem was traced to the *NIX utility called "file." This utility uses patterns to detect file types, such as identifying PostScript files based on specific patterns. OpenOffice writes dates to postscript files, including Tuesdays when the date is represented as "Tue MMM D hh:mm:...". Unfortunately, an error in the pattern for Erlang JAM files caused OpenOffice to misinterpret Tuesdays' date as an Erlang JAM file, preventing it from being sent to the printer.

The complexity of the issue lies in the fact that "file" program attempts to match over 1600 file types, making it prone to both false positives and missed detections. In this case, the Erlang JAM file pattern was matched before the PostScript pattern, leading to the printing failure on Tuesdays. While the solution of reinstalling OpenOffice provided temporary relief, the underlying issue remained unresolved.