Not in general, no, but this particular program doesn't allocate a serious amount of memory (think `ls | less`) and doesn't contain any system calls which can r

Not in general, no, but this particular program doesn't allocate a serious amount of memory (think `ls | less`) and doesn't contain any system calls which can reasonably block[1], so it's extremely unlikely to bite you in this case. (I do think it's bad style, and would never write this program this way.) [1] Assuming you stay away from the Zombie^W Network File System. But NFS mounts going away is bad news anyway, this program holding an extra KB of swappable memory doesn't really intensify the pain.