henry (04/29/83)
It's just possible that this one has been published before, but... If you are on the network (if you aren't, how are you reading this??) and are running V7 mail, then RUN do not walk to the routine sendrmt() in the source and change the size of cmd from 64 to, say, 512. The network can very easily generate pathnames long enough to blow 64 chars of buffer, and very strange things can happen if it does. It happened to us today, and the result was an infinite-looping mail program (bad enough) that was also trying to generate an infinitely-long file (far worse). It showed up after a few megabytes when a filesystem ran out of space. Not good if it happens over the long weekend... Still worse if the thing manages to terminate somehow and uucp tries to send 10 megabytes long-distance at 1200 baud... Henry Spencer U of Toronto