[GNC] QIF import fails in 5.13 if stdout unwritable (also Bugzilla account request)

[John Ralls]

I found the stray print to stdout and removed it. That will be in tomorrow’s nightlies and GnuCash 5.14.

It’s in a Scheme file so you can fix it yourself: Open /usr/share/guile/site/3.0/gnucash/qif-import/qif-to-gnc.scm in your favorite plain-text editor and remove line 458,  (format #t "transaction splits ~s~%" (qif-xtn:splits xtn)) . 

Regards,
John Ralls



> On Nov 1, 2025, at 09:18, Christopher J. Madsen <cjm-gnucash at cjmweb.net> wrote:
> 
> I've encountered a bug that prevented me from importing QIF files into GnuCash 5.13 on Arch Linux.  I'm not sure when this started, as I hadn't tried importing a QIF file for some time.  I'm not sure if it's a known issue as I can't access Bugzilla.  Can an admin give me an account at this address?
> 
> Everything would proceed normally until I got to the actual QIF Import step.  When I clicked Start Import, it would immediately say "Failed" without any other explanation.
> 
> Eventually, I tried running "gnucash --debug".  To my surprise, that fixed the issue.  To make a long story short, I discovered that if GnuCash can't write to stdout, the QIF import will fail in this manner.  In my setup, that's true for applications launched via the Application Menu.
> 
> To reproduce this on Linux, open a new terminal window.  Run "gnucash &" and then "exit" to close the terminal window. Then try to import a QIF file.  It should fail when you click the Start Import button.
> 
> If you run "gnucash >/dev/null &" instead, the QIF import will work fine.  I notice that it writes a number of lines starting "transaction splits" to stdout during the import. Apparently, if those writes fail it considers it a fatal error.  I think that's excessive, especially since stdout for a GUI application is often invisible.
> 
> For now, I've worked around the problem by changing gnucash.desktop to run GnuCash via a shell script that does
> 
>   exec /usr/bin/gnucash "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1
> 
> Please reply directly as I'm not subscribed to the list.
> 
> GnuCash 5.13 Build ID: 5.13-unknown-commit(2025-10-15) (from Arch Linux package gnucash-5.13-2-x86_64)
> 
> -- 
> Christopher Madsen
> 
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