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)
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)
It hails back to the early days of the ampersand, from when it was basically still just Latin “et”: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trebuchet_MS_ampersand.svg
Personally, I do like this font (Fira Mono+Sans), because it still looks professional, without being so boring that I get depression from looking at it.
But yeah, that ampersand is pushing it a bit, as I’m not sure everyone else knows that’s an ampersand…
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.
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
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.
lemmy.ohaa.xyz
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