Why a script passed locally but failed remotely: eight environment facts to diff

A developer's script ran cleanly on a laptop but failed on a remote host with only a generic exit code. The cause was not the code but differences between the two machines in timezone, file-descriptor limits, and default encoding. Instead of adding more logs, the developer now compares structured snapshots of host facts side by side. The author lists eight environment properties that have changed job behaviour, including interpreter version, encodings, timezone, locale, CPU count, and filesystem details. A small script captures these facts as JSON and prints only the fields that differ between hosts.