Task Troubleshooting Guide

Here you will find tips and suggestions for making task behave properly, and bug workarounds.

Segmentation Fault for certain commands

Task 1.3.0 and earlier has been generating segmentation faults after upgrading to a new version of task. This is mostly occurring for Ubuntu users.

While a fix is being worked on, here is a workaround:

% cd
% mv .task .task_backup
% mv .taskrc .taskrc_backup
% task version
(task will recreate .taskrc and .task)
% rm -r .task
% mv .task_backup .task

Please be careful with that "rm -r .task" command - it is all too easy to make a mistake and delete something important.

How to get rid of the "Age" column

The "Age" column that shows up on several reports is proving to be unpopular. In task 1.2.0 and later, here is how to remove it from the reports - make sure you have the line:

showage=no

in your ~/.taskrc file. Note that the "task long" report does not obey this setting in versions prior to 1.3.1.

The "showage" setting is supported in task 1.2.0 or later.
The "task long" report supports this setting in versions 1.3.1 or later.

How do I build task under Cygwin?

Task is built the same way everywhere. But under Cygwin, you'll need to make sure you have the following packages available first:

gcc
make
ncurses

The gcc and make packages allow you to compile the code, and are therefore required, but the ncurses package is optional. Ncurses will allow task to determine the width of the window, and therefore use the whole width and wrap text accordingly.