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