The things you learn, part 1287

[pne]

Today, I found out that Unix will let you execute zero-length files; presumably, it treats them as shell scripts which do nothing and return 0.

I found that after a Perl script I had written for a cow orker started producing logfile errors about how files are open when they aren't, after they had reinstalled the system; turned out that /sbin/fuser, which I was using to check whether a file was open (and which returns 0 if they're open, non-0 if they're not) was suddenly only 0 bytes big. (And /usr/sbin/lsof, which I could have also used, was also 0 bytes.)

Bizarre.