From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: bofh.docfh.misc
Subject: The Perils of Perl
Date: 23 Feb 1998 15:16:43 -0600
Distribution: bofh
Message-ID: <6csovr$r0d@bonkers.taronga.com>

Once upon a time a young language named Perl was walking through the woods.
Her parent process had often told her to stay away in her home directory, for
there were savages in those public directory trees, but she was an experimental
language, often given to whimsy. She hopped from directory to directory,
exploring strange paths where the inodes hadn't been touched in thousands of clock ticks.

All of a sudden, as she wandered through old forgotten parts of /usr/local,
the ground gave way, and young Perl found herself trapped in a sticky Web.
She struggled and struggled, but no matter what she did she was irredeemably
hyperlinked.  Young Perl started to cry, and her sobbing attracted the savage
hunter, a strong young Apache, who had set the trap...

"%Please don't hurt me, sir!"

"http://don't worry, woman, we only eat users. You look like a fine young
 language. Does your parent process know you're here?"

"%No sir, I SLIPped out without IPCing anyone."

With that the Apache broke into a grin and leaped into the pit. He swiftly
translated the hyperlinks and freed Perl from the sticky bits of the Web.
She backed slowly away, but didn't watch where she was going and tripped over
the root. In a flash the savage was on her, and carried her off to his
home directory.

Perl was beside herself with fear (obviously due to an error in process
migration), and by the time the Apache had arrived she had fainted dead
away and was in a sleep state.

When she woke, she discovered herself in a chrooted directory, with all
her symbols stripped, her naked executable draped over the strong body
of the savage. He had had his way with her! She collapsed in tears,
beating her fine white hands against his header. But to no avail, he
was too strong, and before she knew it she was tied up in a dirty
cgi-bin serving unauthenticated web requests from all over the forest.

And there she remains to this day, and her sorry tale is warning enough for
all young interpreters who want to stray too soon from $HOME.