A cask upgrade left the binary hanging. A copy of it started instantly.
·2114 words·10 mins
A Homebrew cask upgrade on 2026-08-28 left my `claude` binary hanging forever on `--version`. No error, no exit, just a prompt that never came back. For two days nothing looked wrong, because every session already open kept working perfectly. The first person to notice was the first person to open a new one. The signature was valid. The bytes were intact. A byte-identical copy of the file, sitting in the same directory, started instantly while the original hung. That left exactly one thing it could be, and it was not the file.