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:
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.
They could always do what Android does and give you a prompt to force close an app that hangs for too long, or have a default subprocess limit and an optional whitelist of programs that can have as many subprocesses as they want.
The thing about fork bombs that it’s not particular process which takes up all the resources, they’re all doing nothing in a minimal amount of space. You could say “ok this group of processes is using a lot of resources” and kill it but then you’re probably going to take down the whole user session as the starting point is not trivial to establish. Though I guess you could just kill all shells connected to the fork morass, won’t fix the general case but it’s a start. OTOH I don’t think kernel devs are keen on special-case solutions.
You don’t really have to kill every process, limiting spawning of new usermode processes after a limit has been reached should be enough, combine that with a warning and always reserving enouh resources for the kernel and critically important processes to remain working and the user should have all the tools needed to find what is causing the issue and kill the responsible processes
While nobody really cares enough to fix these kinds of problems for your basic home computer, I think this problem is mostly solved for cloud/virtualization providers
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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