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From: brown@cs.rochester.edu (Chris Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: infinite regress
Message-ID: <3269@sol.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 15-Oct-87 17:13:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.3269
Posted: Thu Oct 15 17:13:31 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 10:20:19 EDT
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept., Rochester, NY
Lines: 17

How can one escape from an infinitely recursive ksh function, such as
foo () { foo ; }

My experience (blush) is that shift-esc and ctrl-shift-pipe work fine,
in that the process hesitates, and in the second case core is dumped,
but like Jason, or that guy in Halloween, the thing just keeps coming
back, executing forever.

1.  if one is in unix thru ua, then (I presume) one could get to another
window, su root and kill the runaway shell script.

2. but what if one isn't in ua?

I don't plan to do this sort of thing often, but hitting the reset button
is more embarrassing than this posting.
Thanks!
Chris Brown