Find - POSIX Protection From Infinite Output

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

The find 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 cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.
    Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)

    Vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous. To be convinced of this we need only represent, on the one hand, the numberless benefits which result from vanity, as industry, the arts, fashions, politeness, and taste; and on the other, the infinite evils which spring from the pride of certain nations, a laziness, poverty, a total neglect of everything.
    —Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)

    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)