Re: [TUHS] Unix stories

wouldn't get blamed for them. Ugh. I had a programmer who was sent over from the other side of our company to help out. The guy was a complete dolt and broke more than he fixed. Mostly, he never really caught on to how dynamic memory worked in C and was always trashing the malloc areas. So I just backed out every change he made (at least we had source code control going at that point, one of the first things I insisted happen when I took over). Finally, I was on my way in to fire him when I found he had quit an hour previously (fine, I love it when that works out). Unfortunately, he checked in all his "work in progress" which didn't even compile. Backed all that out. Several years later I get a hold of a tool called Purify which finds memory leaks (among other things) In your code. I find a piece of code written by one our better programmers that predate the source code control system that's leaking memory. This can't be. Look through the edit history and there is one edit, my former programmer. He's deleted the free() call in the routine without explanation. Obviously, he had corrupted the malloced area one day, and it crashed in the subsequent free in this routine, so he just deleted it. Bad programmers can hurt you for a good long time after they leave. The only other guy I had to fire at least had done absolutely nothing over his tenure, so we were unaffected in the long run.