POSIX Protection From Infinite Output
Real-world filesystems often contain looped structures created through the use of hard or soft links. The POSIX standard requires that
Thefind utility shall detect infinite loops; that is, entering a previously visited
directory that is an ancestor of the last file encountered. When it detects an infinite
loop, find shall write a diagnostic message to standard error and shall either recover
its position in the hierarchy or terminate.Read more about this topic: Find
Famous quotes containing the words protection, infinite and/or output:
“We all cry out that the world is corrupt,—and I fear too justly,—but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that it is our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)