Comments on: "cat life" >> life

By: thrig

thrig — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:13:05 +0000

True is an additional exec in olden versions of shells, though is built-in to ZSH and other shells these days (and does document the code better). The cat from /dev/random will never end, and could be appended directly to life instead of life.tmp.

By: Gerald Ford

Gerald Ford — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:47:36 +0000

Hi Peter,

Excellent suggestions! I revised my “script” as follows:

$ while [[ true ]]; do
> cat /dev/random >> life.tmp;
> done;

Though, /dev/random should probably be replaced with /dev/karma or something.

P.S. Welcome to the L8B, or the new one at least.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:28:18 +0000

Sometimes it seems the second line could be

cat /dev/random >> life.tmp;

other times it’s

echo namuamidabu >> life.tmp;

Anyway, I always liked the unix command true(1)
From the man page: ‘true – do nothing, successfully’