[sllug-members]: Command to Execute command continuously

[Lamont R. Peterson]

On Wednesday 21 June 2006 12:27am, Randy Clements wrote:
> I just realized I could call the script itself at the end of the script.
> And that seems to be working a bit.  However, is there a better way to do
> what I want to do??

That's a bad idea.  Here's why:

Step 1.  You launch your script.  When you do so, the shell forks another copy 
of the shell with a separate process ID (PID) and it executes.

Step 2.  At the end of the script, it calls itself, forking another shell like 
in step 1.  This shell process will not exit until the command just called 
exits.

Step 3.  Repeat step 2.

So you end up with a process tree like:

bash ./script
 bash ./script
  bash ./script
   bash ./script
    bash ./script
     bash ./script
      bash ./script
       bash ./script
        bash ./script
         bash ./script
          bash ./script
           ...

And so on.

Now, this really won't cause a big problem unless you let it run log enough to 
consume all of your available PIDs.  But it's still quite inefficient.

[snip]
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: F98C E31A 5C4C 834A BCAB  8CB3 F980 6C97 DC0D D409
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