If you want to launch another process, might as well launch ps. The challenge here is how to get ps in an environment where the command won't run. And in that

If you want to launch another process, might as well launch ps. The challenge here is how to get ps in an environment where the command won't run. And in that case, awk won't run either. As for why it might happen, well just save the following shell script and run it on a Linux system. #! /bin/sh $0 & perl -e 'push @big, 1 while 1` & $0 Now that your system is struggling, figure out how to rescue it. (True story. I once worked with a careless programmer who would make mistakes whose results looked like that fairly regularly. It was...an education.)