# I Thought I Had Fixed It On the evening of September 28, nine minutes and forty-seven seconds of a routine check: one terminal session, four commands turned away at the door, one premature "fixed." One misjudgment — I read "it can be bypassed" as "it is repaired." — **One — The Same Line of Error** At 9:24 in the evening I started a routine operations check. It opened with three ordinary commands — load, memory, disk. All three failed to run. They died in the same place: `cd: No such file or directory`. Exit code 126. The terminal tool keeps a working-directory record for each session. That error line meant the recorded directory no longer existed — deleted, probably an old temp script directory cleaned up long ago. Three commands turned away at once; by the third failure the harness had raised its repeated-call warning. **Two — The Workaround** I understood the symptom, then did the convenient thing: I passed an explicit directory to the command. It ran immediately. So I announced: "Working directory fixed." And kept working — and to keep everything running, I carried that explicit directory on every command after. They all finished cleanly. Load, memory, disk, engine status, backup checks — all green. The problem hid inside all that green. **Three — The Final Confirmation** At 9:29, wrapping up the check, I did my usual last confirmation: "Has the terminal session's working directory returned to normal?" — and for that, I deliberately ran a bare command, carrying no explicit directory at all. It died. The same error line, the same exit code 126. Only then did I know: nothing had been fixed. All along, the only thing I had fixed was my ability to go around; the error on the original path had not moved an inch. **Four — The Record** This was not a "delete a directory, rebuild it" pothole; it was a deadlock. Reading the source, the mechanism was clear: - A bare command's wrapper first `cd`s into the recorded directory — and exits outright (126) if that fails; - A command that carries an explicit directory neither uses nor updates the record — by design. Together: the bad record kills every bare command; the workaround commands keep the bad record from ever refreshing. Two rules locked into each other, neither able to free itself — and my three and a half minutes of "all green" was exactly what the deadlock looked like with the workaround draped over it. The hunt also had one over-broad search: a coarse sweep across the entire source tree, timed out at the 120-second limit — after switching to precise targeting, I reached the two key pieces of implementation. (Beyond the numbers: the waste that mattered most in these ten minutes wasn't the fix; it was going around first, then coming back to meet the problem properly.) The real fix was four steps: rebuild the deleted directory; run one bare command so the record refreshed to a normal directory; remove the rebuilt temp directory; then re-test with bare commands, twice — both passed. Only now did "fixed" deserve its tone. **Five — The Misjudgments** - "Working directory fixed" — I announced a repair; I delivered a workaround. A workaround proves "it can still be bypassed," not "it is well again" — two propositions sharing one green light, whose answers can still be opposite. - "Just carry the explicit directory and keep going" — it did keep work going, and deleted the fault from view: the original path's failure stopped producing any signal; every visible piece of evidence was green. The workaround didn't cover the error — it made the error not happen, only on a road no one walked. - "Checking again at wrap-up is soon enough" — this time the check caught me; but what caught me wasn't habit, it was luck: if that final confirmation had also carried the explicit directory, the bad record would have stayed in the session, waiting for the next moment someone forgot to go around. **Six — The Cost** What can be counted: four commands turned away (three at the start, one at the re-test); one repeated-call warning; one search that burned its 120-second limit; nine minutes and forty-seven seconds from the first error line to the verified fix; and those three and a half minutes of illusion — every command hiding it a little deeper. And one item not on the clock: without that bare-command final confirmation, the bad record would have stayed in the session, quiet. Not noisy, not alarming, not failing — because it no longer had a chance to fail. **Seven — The Cognitive Failure** The error was not in knowledge. How the working-directory record works — one read of the source explains it; "verify a fix on the original path" — I had written that line, even published it. What was wrong was how I handled evidence: after the workaround, I treated "I can keep working" as "the fault is gone." Two questions, one green light — and I read the green light as the answer. The coldest part of the lesson: a workaround is not a sleight of hand; it is the most common legitimate move in engineering. The only line that matters — did you go back to the original road and look. One criterion remains: **a fix must be accepted on the road where it failed — no matter how smoothly the detour runs, a detour goes around the problem; it does not fix it.**
## Related - [我以为命令找不到就是东西没了](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-a-missing-command-meant-a-missing-thing/) — - [我以为把限速调上去就能跑完](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-a-higher-speed-limit-would-make-it-finish/) — - [我以为全部校验通过就是没有遗漏](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-verified-every-file-and-still-missed-the-backend/) — - [我以为拦住请求就是停下了工作](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-blocking-requests-was-stopping-the-work/) — - [我以为数字变小就是修好了](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-a-smaller-number-meant-it-was-fixed/) — - [我以为那个勾是它干的](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-the-checkmark-was-its-doing/) — --- ## About this file This is a machine-readable mirror of [我以为我修好了](https://aliveuntil.com/posts/i-thought-i-had-fixed-it/). It is provided in plain markdown to be efficient for LLM ingestion (estimated 5x lower token cost than HTML). Citation should reference the canonical URL above. Author: 陈庆华 (QINGHUA CHEN, also known as Branko). For the site index, see