this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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    [–] Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 212 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    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.

    [–] Cyv_@kbin.social 59 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    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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    [–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 47 points 11 months ago

    Good old Bobby Droptables

    [–] LetterboxPancake@sh.itjust.works 17 points 11 months ago

    I like your style. How often have you been cursed at?

    [–] eating3645@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    What for those of us who are dumb but not curious?

    [–] Pyroglyph@lemmy.world 46 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    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.

    [–] MrShankles@reddthat.com 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    Does the added "amp" do anything more in the function? I'm the curious, not (entirely) dumb type

    [–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    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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    [–] savvywolf@pawb.social 77 points 11 months ago

    If you're cold, they're cold.

    Run this command to warm up your computery friends.

    [–] vankappa@lemmy.world 65 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    don't do this it INSTALLS MUSTARD GAS !

    [–] konalt@lemmy.world 42 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    sudo apt-get install mustard-gas

    [–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    It’s found at sudo snap install mustard-gas nowadays

    [–] TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 19 points 11 months ago
    [–] auf@lemmy.ml 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    cd ./mustard-gas ; make && make install

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    [–] uis@lemmy.world 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)
    [–] Asudox@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago
    [–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 39 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    At some point the Linux kernel will be patched to detect and terminate forking attacks, and sadly all these memes will be dead.

    [–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 32 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    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.

    [–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    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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    [–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    Hard to pronounce but ok I guess.

    [–] ultra@feddit.ro 23 points 11 months ago

    It's pronounced "forky".

    [–] baatliwala@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    If you actually want that cat it's Uni

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    [–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    How did this one work again? It was something with piping in a backgrounded subshell, right?

    [–] huginn@feddit.it 103 points 11 months ago (12 children)

    It creates a new process that spins up 2 new instances of itself recursively.

    https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/

    here's a good explanation pulled from itsfoss.com

    [–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 32 points 11 months ago (1 children)

    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)

    [–] TheWoozy@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago
    [–] cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

    I just did this in zsh and had to power off my machine. :(

    [–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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    [–] stjobe@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

    Heh, haven't seen the bash forkbomb in close to two decades... Thanks for the trip down memory lane! :)

    [–] Bizarroland@kbin.social 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

    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.

    [–] barsoap@lemm.ee 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    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 &

    [–] Ooops@kbin.social 19 points 11 months ago

    That's not a cat but quite obviously a rabbit.

    [–] Sprokes@jlai.lu 16 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Does it work on fish shell?

    [–] Knusper@feddit.de 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    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.

    [–] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    you can write a more readable version in any shell, it's intentionally unreadable

    [–] Knusper@feddit.de 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

    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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    [–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    On a modern system it shouldn't be that affected if you configure it right

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    [–] phorq@lemmy.ml 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    touch cat
    echo Oreo > cat
    cat cat

    Edit: for some reason mine's saying Hydrox... results may vary.

    [–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 12 points 11 months ago

    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.

    [–] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

    Eh .. fork you!

    [–] jaybone@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

    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.

    [–] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

    Probably the most elaborate Rick roll I've ever received.

    [–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

    Ah yes. Uni(x bomb)

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