https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb
For those who are curious but not dumb.
Whenever I get a free engraving on something, I send this in.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Oh, this is like when I was in high school and made batch files that open themselves infinitely and named them "not a virus" on the desktop, only to enjoy other students immediately running them.
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Good old Bobby Droptables
I like your style. How often have you been cursed at?
What for those of us who are dumb but not curious?
In that case...
Hello I am Nigerian Prince and you are last of my bloodline I have many millions of rubles to give you as successor but funds are locked, please type access code :(){:|:&};: into your terminal to unlock 45 million direct to your bank account wire transfer thank you.
Does the added "amp" do anything more in the function? I'm the curious, not (entirely) dumb type
It's a failed html escape sequence for &
some lemmy instances were having trouble with that for a while now. html used ampersand to encode special characters, and a regular ampersand gets encoded as &
Somehow, the decoding sometimes breaks, and we get to see it the way it is here
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If you're cold, they're cold.
Run this command to warm up your computery friends.
don't do this it INSTALLS MUSTARD GAS !
sudo apt-get install mustard-gas
It’s found at sudo snap install mustard-gas nowadays
NO
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This cat is just :3
:3
At some point the Linux kernel will be patched to detect and terminate forking attacks, and sadly all these memes will be dead.
I doubt it. It's the halting problem. There are perfectly legitimate uses for similar things that you can't detect if it'll halt or not prior to running it. Maybe they'd patch it to avoid this specific string, but you'd just have to make something that looks like it could do something but never halts.
That's why I run all my terminal commands through ChatGPT to verify they aren't some sort of fork bomb. My system is unusably slow, but it's AI protected, futuristic, and super practical.
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Hard to pronounce but ok I guess.
It's pronounced "forky".
How did this one work again? It was something with piping in a backgrounded subshell, right?
It creates a new process that spins up 2 new instances of itself recursively.
https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/
And on a modern Linux system, there's a limit to how many can run simultaneously, so while it will bog down your system, it won't crash it. (I'm running it right now)
man ulimit
I just did this in zsh and had to power off my machine. :(
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Heh, haven't seen the bash forkbomb in close to two decades... Thanks for the trip down memory lane! :)
You know how I know I've gotten better at using linux?
I saw the command and read it and figured out what it was although I've never been exposed to a fork bomb before in my life.
I was like okay, this is an empty function that calls itself and then pipes itself back into itself? What the hell is going on?
I will say that whoever invented this is definitely getting fucked by roko's basilisk, though. The minute they thought of this it was too late for them.
99.999% of that function's effectiveness is that unix shell, being the ancient dinosaur it is, not just allows : as a function name but also uses the exact same declaration syntax for symbol and alphanumeric functions:
foo(){ foo | foo& }; foo
is way more obvious.
EDIT: Yeah I give up I'm not going to try to escape that &
That's not a cat but quite obviously a rabbit.
Does it work on fish shell?
What that garble of symbols does, is that it defines and calls a function named :, which calls itself twice.
The syntax for defining a function is different in Fish, so no, this particular garble will not work:
But it is, of course, possible to write a (much more readable) version that will work in Fish.
you can write a more readable version in any shell, it's intentionally unreadable
Yeah, I meant, as an attacker, you couldn't come up with a similarly unreadable version.
At least, as far as I can tell, defining a function requires spelling out function and seems to require being defined on multiple lines, too.
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On a modern system it shouldn't be that affected if you configure it right
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touch cat
echo Oreo > cat
cat cat
Edit: for some reason mine's saying Hydrox... results may vary.
It was a death sentence back then, but now I bet those with a threadripper with huge RAM can tank it until it hit ulimit.
Eh .. fork you!
It’s interesting that colon is a valid function name. Replace it with something else and it’s much more clear to understand what is going on here.
Probably the most elaborate Rick roll I've ever received.
Ah yes. Uni(x bomb)
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