Presented in illustrated form:

; cat foo#!/bin/shcat "$@"; ./foo /etc/termcap | sed 1q >/dev/null./foo: line 2: 3632 Broken pipe  cat "$@"

This behavior is new in Bash 2, as far as I know. I find itextremely irritating, because programs having broken pipesis perfectly normal in Unix. Many filters and so on don'tconsume all of their input, and

The other night I was writing a Pythonprogram that wanted to divide two integers and get a floating pointresult. Normally integer division in Python produces integers, followinga C style model of distinct numeric types; however, Python is slowlymigrating towards a model where the types of numbers are more of animplementation detail.

The general way to get early access to an incompatible change likethis is a magic statement at the start of your module: from__future__ import whatever . I knew that the change in

Recently I've been wondering about the usage pattern of zombie machines.Do spammers typically make only a few connections from each zombie andmove on, or do they use the same machines over and over?

Through my weekly spam stats I know thatsome machines that we reject at connection time try again and again.But what's the distribution like? For example, do most IP addressesget refused once or twice and then go away? So I grabbed our logs andstarted looking.

All of these figures are