From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: barto@kdbarto.org (David Barto) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:56:27 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] hello, world In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3840176A-25FF-45C2-81DA-D3047871752D@kdbarto.org> 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