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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