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.
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.
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)
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:
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…
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