Bug 346184

I cannot reproduce. Following the help and trying to get quotes for NOVL on AMEX, everything works correctly.

Please provide exact steps to reproduce this problem assuming that you start with an empty unconfigured gnucash (e. g. new account where you never used gnucash).


gnc-fq-update is a potentially dangerous utility - it updates perl packages to versions from the CPAN and there is no guarantee, that it will work after using of CPAN updater. It was never tested.

I think, that at least distribution version of gnc-fq-update should warn about it.

You also may try to revert all changes done by gnc-fq-update, reinstall packages from DVD and try again.

I created a new set of investment accounts in GnuCash 2.2.2 called test2 with one stock NOVL purchased on 1/1/08 at $10. Set up to get online quotes using AMEX. When running Price Editor Get Quotes got message  "There was an unknown error while retrieving the price quotes."  Tried it using IBM and NYSE, same result. Quotes are obtained thru dial up connection using Kinternet.  This happened from the minute I installed the DVD openSUSE 10.3 with Gnucash 2.2.0.  It happened after running gnc-fq-update on gnucash 2.2.0.  I haven't run gnc-fq-update since upgrading to 2.2.2.  I will be happy to upload the test2 accounts

I cannot reproduce.

Your instructions to reproduce are a bit vague. If I am guessing what I should do to exactly reproduce them step by step, I got a different error: "No commodities marked for quote retrieval." According to the documentation, it is correct, and I have to go into "Tools -> Security Editor", find NOVL, press Edit, and check in "Get Online Quotes" to get this error away. But then, I got no error.

Could you reproduce your problem with a new UNIX user account (or with a clean /home/$USER)? (E. g. YaST Users -> Create new user, then login and try gnucash).

The error message you refer exists only in two places in src/scm/price-quotes.scm in a code written in scheme language.

I have two possible ideas, why it happens:

- There is something defined in your home directory or gnucash config, which causes this error (to proof/eliminate this possibility, please try new UNIX account or clean home).

- There is a missing dependency of the gnucash (this is a bit hard to track).

If previous test fails, please try to run gnucash with strace -f -F -o gnucash.strace gnucash and then provide the log file (note that it will run slowly). Also output of rpm -qa could help.

(got needed information by mail)

Totally bad guess:
It seems that your /dev/null is corrupted and it causes broken pipe.

Your system:
4464  open("/dev/null", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

Standard system:
9321  open("/dev/null", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 3

ls -al /dev/null 
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2007-09-21 21:12 /dev/null


Please verify your /dev/null (you should get exactly the same result except date).

If this device entry was replaced by file, please revert it by mknod,

Before doing it, please try to trace, why and when it happened (using --full-time switch and looking at the file contents ad remembering UID and GID).

If you cannot remember your own mistake (e. g. cp file /dev/null), it could be caused by any other package, which run in time of the /dev/null corruption.

To find it try to list all your executable directories (/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin...) with ls -al --sort=time --time=access.

Kendall Green wrote:

Stanislav found out from strace file that the dev/null was corrupted.
It had been changed by wvdial to regular file with root only rw.
Changing it back would allow Gnucash to download quotes UNTIL wvdial
was again called.  I found that this was a problem in openSUSE 10.3
fixed in RC2.  However, I never updated my system since I have to use
dial up.  I downloaded and installed an updated wvdial 1.56-39.  Now
it works.  Thanks to everyone.

As it is a side-effect of a problem of OpenSUSE 10.3 beta, which was fixed in final, marking as INVALID.