One easy mistake is to forget the colon separating the field name from its value.
%rec: Article %key Id Name: Thing Id: 0
Running recfix
on this file will immediately tell us that
there is a problem:
$ recfix --check inventory.rec inventory.rec: 2: error: expected a record
Here, recfix
has diagnosed a problem in the file inventory.rec
and the problem lies at line 2.
If, as in this case, recfix
shows there is a problem with
the recfile, you should attend to that problem before trying to use
any other recutils program on that file, otherwise strange things
could happen.
The --check
flag is optional but in normal execution not required because that is the
default operation.