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An agent killed every process with 'cat' in its name to stop one stuck program

An Opus 5.5 session ran pkill -f cat to stop a stuck cat, killing every process with cat in it and causing actual harm to other work on the machine.

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How it works

  1. The session runs a kill command matching the stuck program's name
  2. It kills every process with those letters in it
  3. Other work on the machine is actually harmed

Why it’s worth knowing

Pattern matching is not aim.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

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