Re: [FWP] Fun with POD

["Abigail" <abigail@foad.org>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 06:14:52PM -0400, Bernie Cosell wrote:
> On 21 Apr 2001, at 13:40, Vicki Brown wrote:
> 
> > Let's imagine for a moment that you have a Perl script, fooscript. It starts
> > like this, with a POD header all ready for pod2man.
> > 
> > 		#!/usr/bin/perl
> > 
> > 		=head 1 NAME
> > 
> > 		fooscript - a script that really foos
> > 
> >         =head SYNOPSIS
> > 
> >         fooscript -f -g -h
> > 
> > 
> > Now, consider foa moment that you've made a small editing mistake. There is a
> > blank line above the
> > 
> > 		#!/usr/bin/perl
> > 
> > Now, imagine that you run this script...
> > 
> >         fooscript
> > 
> > What will your system administrator's reaction be?
> 
> Probably not a happy camper.  Unless I'm missing some real trickery, the 
> blank line will kill the shebang, and so the kernel will feed the script 
> to your shell.  # is a comment and it is unlikely that you have a program 
> in your path whose name is '=head', so that'll generate an error... and 
> then your program will try to call itself at the
> 
> > 		fooscript - a script that really foos
> 
> and the new instance will try to call ITSELF, and so on ad infinitum.


Well, if the sysadmins notices, (s)he'll come over and crush your
skull with a blunt object. Rightly so, because you could have hit
^C long before the sysadmins pager went off.

Off course, you should do your tests in a directory that's not in your
PATH, and putting `.' in your PATH is one of the seven deadly sins, so
it shouldn't have happened in the first place... ;-)


Abigail

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