2013-04-11



Xpdf is the pdf viewer I use most frequently.  Unfortunately,  it
has  some  problem  and prints a few warnings whenever you invoke
it.  This is annoying.  Thus,  I  created  a  wrapper  script  to
redirect  those  warnings to /dev/null. This is a hack but it re-
moves the annoyance. Unfortunately, I wrote:

     ed ~/bin/xpdf
     ?/home/meillo/bin/xpdf
     a
     #!/bin/sh
     exec xpdf "$@" 2>/dev/null
     w
     37
     q

I did not even realize the problem when my system became unusably
slow  and  eventually  died.  The second time, I was lucky to run
top(1) and see all those xpdf processes -- I had started a  fork-
bomb  on  my  own system! It took endlessly to log in as root and
run `pkill -9 xpdf'.

Solution: The script was missing `/usr/bin/' to invoke  the  true
xpdf(1) and not the wrapper itself recursively.

Don't create equally-named wrapper scripts too quickly!



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>