Earlier today, a coworker asked me to give him some help because he
was no longer able to commit to the cvs repository. Didn't have
permission or somesuch.
I check several things on our repository server. Yep, he's part of
that group, yep, that project has the right ownership and right
permissions, yep, the partition hasn't randomly filled up.
So i sit down in front of his terminal, and he mentions casually that
he's been toying around with ksh. Huh?
Given that, i check to see if the alias he was trying to use even
existed. It didn't.
"Yeah, and a bit with tcsch, too."
This was met with a full-on eyebrow raising.
So i logged him out of his current shell. And was dropped into another
one.
Then i did it again. This time i received the prompt "[\U][\w]:",
which was darkly amusing.
Again. I get a "%". Cute.
Again. Again. Again, cycling through a couple permutations of the
prompt, and again. Until i had finally managed to get back to his
original login shell.
I counted up and realized he had nested over ten shells deep
away from his original login. I looked askance in his general
direction.
He grinned, a bit embarassed, and waved me away, thanking me and
offering assurance that he wouldn't run off into shell-land like that
again.
Which wasn't really what i wanted, but hey.
Ten nested shells!