[TUHS] hello, world

[David Barto]

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 at kdbarto.org
barto at ucsd.edu