A few months back, when a colleague/host provider granted me telnet access so I could learn Perl, he advised me to be careful not to write code that produced infinite loops: 

while (1) {
}

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He said they could bring down the server. Of course, like any newbie, I spawned a few of these beasts on accident (this was quite awhile ago). I was able to frantically hit CTRL-D or CTRL-Z to stop the program on a couple such occasions but on a couple of others I was forced to close out the telnet window completely. The server didn't seem to be affected but to this day I wonder if those Perl programs aren't still running and I'm still a little worried about creating infinite loops. So what's the scoop? How dangerous are they?

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In reply to Do infinite loops ever die? by nysus

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