In college, assignment was "build a Linux shell using C language."

Me not reading the assignment fully, only noting the due date is a week away, like FML.

No sleep for 3 days, building "argc" character parser breaking apart each user argument string to determine the desired shell string for each command. 

Slept for 24 hours then spend 3 more days writing individual routines for "sh", "cd", and so on...

I was so overwhelmed. I almost dropped out of college.

Two weeks later my TA called me into a meeting and brought up my 16k+ lines of code. 

TA states, did you write this? 

Me thinking trouble, I admit to writing the code myself. The professor walks in, I'm sweating bullets thinking its the end. The TA and professor both look at each other and smile.  How long did this take. I timidly responded 7 days.

Professor turns around chuckling and proceeds to complete the assignment in 22 lines of code on the white board. My jaw drops.

Turns out, C has a built-in called "EXEC". This handles system calls internally during runtime. The assignment specifically stated use "exec", at the bottom.

Ill just leave this here....