Collecting favorite bug stories

["Lord of Sith" Kajihara]

In article <3669 at curly.ucla-cs.UCLA.EDU> you write:
>I am collecting anecdotes of experiences, (real or imagined) 
>for a book to be titled:
>
>    MY FAVORITE BUGS: Humourous, and Horrible Experiences in Software
>                      Engineering.
>
>As one might tell from the title, the book will be filled with wonderful
>tales that programmers tell each other, over a few too many beers,
>after a long day at the keyboard.
>

Sorry about posting this, but we do not support ARPA here.

I don't know that this qualifies for what you ask, but the following comes
from an inexperience with C and file processing.

I had a program that would read from n text files and write to an output file.
The first time that I ran the program, I exceeded the amount of disc quota I
had on the system.

The problem:  in using command-line arguments to identify my files, I had
inadverdently included my output file as input.  Result:  an endless loop.

In the following code, argc is the number of arguments to the program, argv
is an array of character pointers.  argv[argc-1] is the output file.

     .
     .
     .

     for (inc = 1; inc <= argc-1; ++inc)

        process(argv[inc],argv[argc-1]);

     .
     .
     .

The solution is to make the condition of the for loop '<' rather than '<='.

I am only an undergraduate physics major so forgive me for my modest and
possibly trivial solution.

      Scott Kajihara


-- 
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     Me?  A CS major?  Now, I know that either you are joking or LAKking.

      -- Scott Kajihara

      UUCP:  ...!udenva!skajihar

     Disclaimer:  the above quote is not meant to insult computer science types;
                  it is just that I could never become CS and remain my usual
                  insane self (they have always said that we are strange but
                  have charm).
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