[MacPerl] Strange behaviour. Cool... I think?

[gucdl@gd.chalmers.se (Dario Lopez-KŠsten )]

Hello!

I thought I'd try the following snippet:

print system("date");

because I am fiddling with dates for my script.

Don't try this unless you've saved all your docs in all your programs. It
only left MacPerl spinning on my mac, but it may implode on yours.

I know that system is not supposed to work on the mac, but the footnote on
p. 153 states about system("date");:

"...  Perl performs the operations of the shell if the command is simple
enough, and this one is."

With that in mind i figured that it would probably work, since it wouldn't
really be calling "system". Well, it didn't.

What happened was that MacPerl printed out the contents the memory(?) to
the MacPerl console. I couldn't make it stop, so it had to force-quit
MacPerl to regain control of my mac. I didn't hear the harddrive work, so
an unqualified guess is that it printed the contents of my RAM.

My question is if this is some kind of bug. Since system rally isn't
supposed to work on the mac, maybe it isn't.

Any comments?

Sincerely

/dario


-- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Lopez-KŠsten                      GD DataCenter, Gšteborgs Datacentral
Mac & Network Consultant        Gibraltargatan 25, S-412 96 Gšteborg, SWEDEN
<gucdl@gd.gu.se>                                       Tel: +46 +31 772 8339
<gucdl@gd.chalmers.se>                                 Fax: +46 +31 772 8390