I've got several ledger files: some I use regularly and others not so
much. I've just started touching one of those and found problems, and I'm
wondering if there's an easy way to find out where the problem exists and
how to fix it. I realize it may be impossible, unless I were willing to
take the time to sanitize the data first. I also realize that a good file
recovery might help, but I think I found the same problem in recent
backups, and so I might be into a binary search to find out the last good
file, assuming there is one.
If I run
ledger --sort d reg ^Expenses
I get 12 complaints. The first, lightly edited for privacy, says,
While parsing file "FQFN", line 339:
While parsing transaction:
> 2006/09/31 * Credit Dividend
Error: Day of month is not valid for year
Ledger is correct: that is indeed what the file says. There are two
entries like that; the other one is for 2007/09/31, and it is on the same
account but later in the file.
The next says,
While parsing file "FQFN", line 401:
While balancing transaction from "FQFN", lines 399-401:
> 2006/12/19 * Account Payee
> Assets:Account:Name 2.054 AssetSymbol
> Income:Another:Account:Name $36.23
Unbalanced remainder is:
$72.46
Amount to balance against:
$72.46
Error: Transaction does not balance
There are 8 entries like that, covering entries in about 30 lines of the
~2,500 line file. In each case, the structure is the same: the unbalanced
remainder is always twice the income, and the amount it is to balance
against always looks the same.
There are two unique errors. The first is
While parsing file "FQFN", line 986:
Error: Posting with null amount's account may be misspelled:
"Assets:Current Assets:Savings:Name Of The Financial Institution $123.45"
That entry exists. That happened because there is one space before the $
and not two; when I added the space in, the error went away. That entry
was dated 2008, and I can't imagine having touched that entry in years.
Finally, I get
While parsing file "FQFN", line 2970:
While parsing posting:
Assets:Account:Name $0.11=\
^
Error: Backslash at end of commodity name
I find exactly 1 entry with an amount of $0.11. There is no visible
character after the second "1". Hexl-mode shows these bytes: 2430 2e31
310a 2020 2020 496e
Looking at nearby entries, I always find the 0a20202020 pattern between the
last digit and the next entry.
Those errors seem strange to me:
- Why did I get two errors about dates with the same month/day
combination on the same account? Is that just an interesting coincidence?
- I don't understand the complaints about the transactions not matching;
that used to work, and the visible amounts that don't balance seem equal.
- Where did the "=\" come from?
I can think of two possible reasons:
- I did get SMART errors last summer, and I then replaced the drive.
Perhaps there were real errors, but the regularity seems strange to have
been caused by a failing disk.
- I may not have run ledger on this file since upgrading from 2.6 to
3.1.0 when I upgraded from Debian Wheezy to Jessie. I can see that causing
problems in reporting, but all but the last error happened to quite old
data, so it's unlikely I was even working in those parts of the file, and I
don't think ledger or ledger-mode write to the file in these ways.
I suspect there are other possible reasons, too.
My questions:
1. Has anyone seen anything like this? Does it make any sense?
2. Is there an obvious command sequence in ledger 3.1.0 that would find
any other errors, or did this likely get everything it can recognize?
3. Is there something obvious I can do to fix the transactions that do
not balance or the "=/"?
With only 11 errors, it sounds nicer to fix those than to restore from the
past and then add more recent transactions.
Thanks,
Bill
PS: I like the new ledger-mode.
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