A few years ago I needed to merge two directory trees with some pictures (don't ask ;~). There were some duplicates, some files that were only in one or the other tree, some files that had the same name but different content and so forth. So I started with a script that was supposed to browse those two trees and delete the real duplicates. Well ... gues what ... I inverted some condition by accident and started deleting the UNIQUE files. Oh my ... I did succeed to undelete some of the files, but quite a few have been lost :-(((

Such things really teach you to test things first :-}

P.S.: (Not Perl related and not really dumb ... or maybe yes, who knows.) A friend of mine was writing some school project in Pascal with TurboVision. And the program kept printing an error message "Null pointer assignment" when it was exiting. Some object was destroyed too soon or whatever. He could not find the error no matter what so he solved it differently. He made the program print "Made by " just before closing ;-)

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

In reply to Re: (OT) What Was Your Most Bone-headed Programming Error? by Jenda
in thread (OT) What Was Your Most Bone-headed Programming Error? by Wally Hartshorn

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