Yesterday, my friend, who is learning Erlang, asked me to show him, how to use funs in Erlang. I could have just typed the answer in Adium window, but I like to be sure, that everything, I am sending always compiles and works, so I quickly created Erlang module, scribbled an example and tried to compile it.
While in a rush, I didn’t think of a file name and just named the file file.erl. When I compiled it, I got an error saying:
121> c(file).
{error,sticky_directory}
=ERROR REPORT==== 20-Sep-2014::10:08:33 ===
Can't load module that resides in sticky dir
Sticky dir is something with file permissions, right?
So I quit the Erlang shel, checked the permissions and restarted it:
122> q().
ok
$ erl
Erlang R16B02 (erts-5.10.3) [smp:2:2] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
{"init terminating in do_boot",{undef,[{file,path_eval,[[".","/Users/tomaszkowal"],".erlang"],[]},{c,f_p_e,2,[{file,"c.erl"},{line,474}]},{init,eval_script,8,[]},{init,do_boot,3,[]}]}}
Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
init terminating in do_boot ()
WTF?! I am opening fresh Erlang shell and it crashes?! Did I just broke the ErlangVM?! How? And then, while reading the error, it struck me: “.” is in the path, so my module called file overshadowed file module, which is used during boot to search for .erlang and execute its contents [1].
Of course, I didn’t come up with that idea during the first reading. Somehow my brain did not associate the file from error message with file that I just created. They were in different contexts, because error is from the guts of ErlangVM and my module is just 4 lines of code including module declaration and exports.
So – to answer the question from post title: Send an Erlang developer module called file and let him compile it. If he or she is not careful enough to delete the .beam file, he/she won’t be able to use erl in this directory and he/she will get cryptic message, that puzzled couple of people [2]. It took me couple of minutes to realise how stupid I was, so maybe someone will fall for it too!
This also explains, why in most Erlang applications module names are so long and prefixed with application name. There are no namespaces in Erlang, so all modules should have unique names. It is not as bad as it seems. I am working with Erlang for a couple of years now and it was the first time, I had this kind of problem. Next time, I’ll name my file asdf.
[1] http://erlang.org/doc/man/erl.html#id168387
[2] http://erlang.2086793.n4.nabble.com/Installing-a-module-from-code-td2113022.html
tkowal 