On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Douglas Moyes <doug...@hq.newdream.net> wrote: > I nearly brought down a server today. > > # alias d="perl-script " > .... > > # d() { > # perl-script $1 |grep something|cut -d ' ' -f 3 > # } > # d something > ..... ..... .... CRASH > > turns out bash went into a loop calling d over and over again, which > resulted in thousands of grep, bash, and -d processes being executed. It > wasn't pretty.
it rather went to calling "perl-script" over and over, d was expanded when you defined the function so you ended up with a recursive "perl-script" function.