29 Dec
2011
29 Dec
'11
2:56 a.m.
A long time ago at the University that I graduated from. . .
Shell scripts had just added the ability to have functions in them, so I wrote a script to
do some processing of files that I had, and then logged off to let it run in the
background.
The shell script was named 'A'.
In the script was a function, named 'A'
When the script ran, instead of calling 'A' the function, it called
'A' the script, and you can see where this goes from here.
2 days later I received an email from the admin (thankfully a friend) who enclosed the
'ps -axl' output from the machine. It showed thousands of copies of my script
running and a load that indicated that the machine was useless for almost everything.
With the admonishment: "Don't ever do this again."
I haven't.
David
David Barto
barto(a)kdbarto.org
barto(a)ucsd.edu