Developer's cleanup script silently failed for weeks due to a flawed pattern match

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A developer wrote a process cleanup routine that used wildcard pattern matching to identify and kill targeted processes. The script reported success on every run, but had never actually matched or terminated a single process. The flaw stemmed from incorrectly escaped path separators, which caused the matcher to read them as literal characters, making it structurally unable to find any matches. The bug was only discovered when the developer manually counted surviving processes and found seven still running. The fix involved replacing the wildcard match with a simple substring check, highlighting the importance of verifying tools against known positives before trusting their output.

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