A/UX: Bourne Shell Resource Loophole


Article Change History
----------------------
08/31/92 - REVIEWED
* For technical accuracy.


The Bourne Shell has had a well-known and famous resource loophole since
version 7. This article desribes it.

The following line of code starts a big loop that exhausts memory after a
while.

$<<`ls`

This yields messages like "Swap space running out, Needed xx pages", and
you have to "kill" the program. The "kill" generates a core file that is
LARGE. In most cases, the core file can't be dumped on the file system,
due to lack of space.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012