9mo ago

Me working with the OS

This happend to me right noww as I tried to write a gui task manager for the GNU/Linux OS

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Try it again
Do you know the definition of insanity?
- Do you know the definition of insanity?
  do you know software developers?
  
  But did you get the reference?
- What's really insane is that sometimes the second identical test actually works.
  
  Then you breathe a sigh of relief, merge it with a comment of "bug fix", write no documentation--especially about how it failed testing, and quit the gig during the inevitable helpdesk explosion; walking away from the fireball like the Michael Bay maniac you are.
This is why VM snapshotting is so valuable.
My IDE is my real workstation, and it hosts a VM in which I can plop some code, run it, crash, revert and try again.
How are you crashing your system?! Crashing program sure, but the entire system?
- Try it out on your own system.
  shell
  
  :(){ :|:& };:
  It's totally possible
  
  Doesn't explain OPs task management example. And won't crash the kernel, just make things unresponsive
- rm -rf
  <some placeholder>
  Works for . current directory. Yay!
  ... also works for / system root. 🔥 Nay!
  
  Does it? I thought / specifically was protected, and you needed to add --no-preserve-root.
  
  That won't crash your kernel, and I was more curious about the OPs example. Task management is basically reading some files, and sending signals, it should be near impossible to crash the system.
- A high level explanation
  
  OPs example was task management, which doesn't require kernel modules.
My first programming related memory is of the QBasic interpreter.
I had written some code I was quite happy with, but not saved it yet. As part of a subroutine for sound output, I quickly wrote a loop from 20 to 20000 to output a test signal over 1 second each with that frequency via the PC speaker and hit execute.
Realizing my mistake, It being MS-DOS and thus single-threaded, I couldn't Ctrl+C out of it without killing QBasic altogether and losing my code. I couldn't turn town the PC speaker.
I ended up closing various doors between the PC and me and waiting it out.
What language were you using?
Python maybe? I don't know of any other interpreted language, that you may be calling system commands from, without saving to disk
I use C and C++ and my IDEs save to disk before compiling. Makes sense to not try compiling when there are potentially 2 versions (one on RAM or /tmp and one on Disk) and the build system might be running multiple commands, which the IDE may/may not know of, in my case.

28 comments