this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 135 points 10 months ago (6 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

[–] cashews_best_nut 10 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Not mine, grabbed it from the link, but it's a great explanation!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

tom jones lesser known single

[–] ook_the_librarian 2 points 10 months ago

Goodness, gracious, fork bomb in bash

[–] hexabs 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Thanks friend. One question, is it necessary to pipe to itself? Wouldnt : & in the function body work with the same results?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That would only add one extra process instance with each call. The pipe makes it add 2 extra processes with each call, making the number of processes grow exponentially instead of only linearly.

Edit: Also, Im not at a computer to test this, but since the child is forked in the background (due to &), the parent is free to exit at that point, so your version would probably just effectively have 1-2 processes at a time, although the last one would have a new pid each time, so it would be impossible to get the pid and then kill it before it has already replaced itself. The original has the same "feature", but with exponentially more to catch on each recursion. Each child would be reparented by pid 1, so you could kill them by killing pid 1 i guess (although you dont want to do that... and there would be a few you wouldn't catch because they weren't reparented yet)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I may be wrong, but you could use : &;: & as well, but using the pipe reduces the amount of characters by two (or three, counting whitespace)