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PHP infinite recursion

What can I say? How about “toy language”?

$ php -r 'function foo() { foo(); } foo();'
Segmentation fault

I’m not saying that infinite recursion is a good idea, but during development it can happen by accident, and I don’t expect such a simple error to crash the PHP interpreter! (Also it took me about 20 minutes to debug this problem, as I had no idea where it happened, nor indeed what the problem was..)

PHP 5.2.6 on Linux 2.6.26 Debian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Broken, PHP. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “PHP infinite recursion”

  1. Robin Kearney Says: November 18th, 2009 at 3:17 pm

    I get:

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in Command line code on line 1

    PHP 5.3.0 on osX 10.6.2

  2. adrian Says: November 18th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

    OK, that is an improvement, esp as it tells you the line number (which is what you want!)

  3. barbara Says: November 28th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    i like ;)

  4. Michael Kohl Says: February 23rd, 2010 at 11:44 pm

    You may like this in Bash then:


    :(){ :|:& };:

    Hint: Don’t try this on a system that you are not willing to reboot…

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