Conky: write error: Bad file descriptor

Question

I just switched from Debian 9 to Ubuntu 18.04 (don't judge me).

I had a working Conky (don't judge me again) script on Debian 9 which does not run any more on Ubuntu 18.04 with the latest Conky version (1.10.9).

The problem is that every single custom command results in the following error:

write error: Bad file descriptor

It happens on simple commands such as a simple cat on a file. However these commands work perfectly in my terminal, but I keep getting these cat: write error: Bad file descriptor, or cut: write error: Bad file descriptor or whatever depending on the command. So I guess there is something going wrong when catching the output of the command, but what can it be? I just can't find any clue.

Answer 1

Use strace command: strace is a powerful command line tool for debugging and trouble shooting programs in Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. It captures and records all system calls made by a process and the signals received by the process

$ strace cat test