Tooling

On 7 September we wrote a script to bring every repository on our GitHub account to the same settings: branch protection, secret scanning, the files a public repository should have. It had a dry-run flag. Run with it, the script said: every repository in scope already conforms It had checked none of them. getopts stops at the first word The script took a subcommand and then flags: apply -n. It parsed the flags with getopts, bash’s built-in option parser, which reads arguments from the front and stops at the first one that doesn’t start with a dash. The first argument was apply. So getopts stopped there and never saw -n. ...

“are these tasks still running?” I asked that on 2 September, about two background jobs Claude had started, which had been sitting at “Running” for 94 minutes. They were waiting for a Flatpak SDK to finish installing. It had finished at about the four-minute mark. Nothing had failed. They were waiting for themselves Both loops tested for the install with pgrep -f "flatpak install", and were written to stop once nothing matched. pgrep -f searches the whole command line of every process. It leaves itself out of the results, but not the shell that called it, and that shell’s command line held the entire loop. So each loop found itself, and each found the other. They were waiting for their own exit. ...