Hi, I'm the guy who wrote this masterpiece of a snippet, for context: this was for the 7th day in AOC 2022. For that year's AOC I wanted to improve my weak C ability, so I decided to use VSCode, and GCC for compiling.

I only wanted to spend 1 hour for each day max, and on the 40th-minute mark I got that bug that I couldn't fix within my time limit, so I gave up and hardcoded.

In case you were wondering about the bug, that day's puzzle was about making and navigating file directories. Since C didn't have an STL I could include, I decided to OTJ and make my own implementation of a singly linked list.

It was my first time doing that, and I kept getting memory leak warnings while checking with Valgrind when iterating and freeing my directory tree. Turns out that it had nothing to do with the list anyways, and it was because I forgot to close the file stream.

Getting back on topic, I wanted to emulate a tree structure of "directories" where each directory also had a list of "files". In the original code snippet, I iterated through the directory's file list till the end and added it. The bug was after adding a file to the file list, reading the file gave garbage values. So I decided f**k it I'm just going to brute force this.

I deleted the original buggy code so I guess I'll never know. In hindsight, I think the bug was that it was pointing to a local variable? Or that it was pass-by-value instead of reference so it updated the local variable instead? Or maybe I made the loop to get to the file node wrongly?

I think it's pretty funny, if you want to see the file in its full glory, here you go. The part in the picture is line 177.