Spent 3 hours hunting a phantom error on a render that came down to one missing period in a file path

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why my composite kept failing until I noticed a stray dot in my folder reference, has anyone else lost a whole afternoon to something this stupid?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_eric13d ago

I read somewhere that these tiny errors are actually the most common bug in software dev (I think it was a Stack Overflow survey or something). Missing a character in a file path or a variable name can take forever to track down because your brain just skips right over it. Had a similar thing with a Python script that ran fine locally but broke on the server, took me two hours to realize I used a forward slash instead of a backslash in a Windows path.

the_linda13d ago

Four hours seems like a lot for a backslash mix-up. I mean, your brain just skips over it because you already know what it's supposed to say, right? I've done stuff like that too, but I usually catch it in like 20 minutes tops before I start cursing at the screen. Stack Overflow surveys are great and all, but they also show people spend way too much time on stuff that's basically a typo. Maybe it's more about the programmer than the bug itself. Honestly, if you know it's a path issue, just print the damn path to the console and move on.😂

john65013d ago

Four hours definitely sounds like a lot, but I think @the_linda might be underestimating how easy it is to fall into a mental trap with these things. The problem isn't really the backslash itself, it's that your brain already has the "correct" version in your head, so you literally read over the mistake twenty times and it looks fine. Print statements are the classic fix, but sometimes you're so sure it's a logic error or a permissions thing that you don't even think to check the path syntax until you're totally out of ideas. Ever since I started using a linter that catches path separators automatically, I've saved myself literally hours of that kind of frustration.