[net.unix-wizards] Ohmigosh, I can't find it!

stan@clyde.UUCP (10/27/83)

After the following shell script ran for five or six times, I got
the message "I can't find it!" followed by a carriage return.
I couldn't find that string in the shell (esh), echo.c, ps.c, or sleep.c .
Although I didn't try real hard, I couldn't get the problem to repeat.
Anybody got any ideas??

{shell=esh, system=system V,  mach=vax 11/780}

	while true
	do
		echo `ps -el|grep -c '^....R'` "  \c"
		sleep 1
	done
=-=-=-=-=-=
		Stan King			phone: 201-386-7433
		Bell Labs, Whippany, NJ		Cornet:  8+232-7433
		room 2A-111			uucp:	 clyde!stan

dan%sri-tsc@sri-unix.UUCP (10/31/83)

I had a similar experience while a coop student.  I was in late at night
printing out a rather large, racy digitized picture on our UNIX system, and I
decided to copy it to tape so I could take it back to school with me.  While
running "tp" (it was a V6 unix system), I got the error message "UNIX is
feeling B A D -- call Kernighan".  At the time I was a rather novice UNIX
user, and when I saw that message I broke out into a cold sweat, aborted the
tp command, and spend the next two weeks frantically grepping through tp, the
shell, and the kernel for that message, trying to figure out what I had
broken.  I never found it.  Five years later at a USENIX, while talking to my
old boss, he mentioned that he had seen me logged into the console one night
doing illicit things, and echoed that message to the console.

If all else fails, suspect your friends...

	-Dan