Recently, I noticed a process running script on a server for which I had to review the logs. As a reminder, this tool logs every command typed in a terminal but also its output. The running process was :
$ ps aux | grep log
user 21842 5.0 0.1 22244 2576 pts/0 S+ 08:58 0:17 script -f /home/.../user/.log/13-12-19_08-58-30_10.45.99.1_shell.log -q
user 23947 0.0 0.0 14428 1040 pts/1 S+ 09:04 0:00 grep --color=auto log
The problem with this process arises if you cat the log file while it’s already big (e.g. after havin executed a few find /). Given the command options used, the -f option will flush cat’s output while the read is not over yet, ending in an infinite loop while writing to the log file and reading it concurrently from both script and cat processes.
This causes the log file to fill the disk up to space exhaustion in only a few seconds !
Also see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15100504/infinite-loop-on-script-binary