• tb_@lemmy.world
    2·
    9 months ago

    Because I didn’t know what a fork bomb was:

    a fork bomb is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.

    […]

    A classic example of a fork bomb is one written in Unix shell :(){ :|:& };:, possibly dating back to 1999, which can be more easily understood as

    fork() fork fork & fork

    > 
> In it, a function is defined (fork()) as calling itself (fork), then piping (|) its result into itself, all in a background job (&).
> 
> The code using a colon `:` as the function name is not valid in a shell as defined by POSIX, which only permits alphanumeric characters and underscores in function names. However, its usage is allowed in GNU Bash as an extension.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb)
    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      1·
      9 months ago

      You’re telling markdown to format the code in the language fork() { and then break the code block early by not having > in front of the next line. Here’s a quoted code block formatted in sh:

      fork() {
   fork | fork &
}
fork
      • tb_@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 months ago

        It seems the app I use to browse doesn’t play entirely nice with markdown. I updated my formatting a little, thanks for the notice.