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Pipes, Forks, and Zombies

35 pointsby toshtoday at 10:37 AM5 commentsview on HN

Comments

syncsynchalttoday at 5:08 PM

> If we pipe seq to less and look at the list of running processes using ps aux, we can see that the seq program is not running. ... This explains why the seq program is killed when it is piped to less.

This explanation isn't correct, since a running `less` would not close the pipe and is still a reader. Writes to the pipe would block until `less` fully consumed it, or until `less` was quit such as with the `q` command.

The text _is_ correct if you add a missing step to `q`uit out of the `less` program. I think this step must have been dropped along the way. Unfortunately the screen capture doesn't show this step either.

show 2 replies
gibibittoday at 2:33 PM

Not "literative" programming, but "literate" programming. The official Knuth page: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

camdvtoday at 2:10 PM

It also gets "Literate Programming" wrong, ironically.

Lucasoatotoday at 1:33 PM

Sadly this article is about programming and not suggestions for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

lacymorrowtoday at 2:15 PM

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