Be careful what you wish for. Today I decided, instead of doing my homework, that I was going to start learning mutt. I normally localize my system to es_ES, but this makes the default key bindings not make sense when I look at a UI in Spanish. I decided to whip up a two line shell script called mutt: #!/bin/sh LANG=C mutt I placed in ~/bin, which ordinarily, would not be a problem. The problem came with this: $ echo $PATH /home/sanchezr/bin:/home/sanchezr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games This way, when I typed `mutt' at the command line, I would hit the `mutt' in ~/bin and not the one in /usr/bin. Naturally, since I did not specify an explicit path to the `mutt' in my script, my invocation caused a fork to execute mutt, which happened to be the shell script, since it was before the binary in /usr/bin. Imagine my surprise when it fairly locked my machine up and consumed all my memory (1 GB) and swap (another 1 GB) in about a minute with fork after fork racing to execute the `mutt' in ~/bin. I fixed the script like this: #!/bin/sh LANG=C /usr/bin/mutt Hopefully, someone gets a chuckle out of this. -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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