So it creates a function, a, which what it does is it calls itself and pipes its output to itself (the a | a). The ampersand means that this will run entirely in the background. Then, to initiate things, the command calls a (in the last line)
So, there will be exponentially be many recursive calls to a, which will eventually deplete your stack and set your pc on fire
Fork bombs are things that infinitely spawn new forks, until the system crashes. Its an infinite ‘if true, spawn new instance’ loop that only stops when the system gets a hard reset.
Is a fork bomb, it starts a process that starts two more processes, which each start two more processes, which each start two more processes, which each start two more processes…
And eventually the computer locks up plus it’s hard to kill since the PIDs change constantly.
Its creating a function named : that spawns two copies of : then calls that function to start the duplicating code or forks. For that, its called a fork bomb.
ELI5?
It’s a fork bomb. It exponentially forks processes in the background in an attempt to consume all CPU cycles.
Replace “:” with “a” you get
Reformatting
So it creates a function, a, which what it does is it calls itself and pipes its output to itself (the a | a). The ampersand means that this will run entirely in the background. Then, to initiate things, the command calls a (in the last line)
So, there will be exponentially be many recursive calls to a, which will eventually deplete your stack and set your pc on fire
Use `` to disable text formatting,
it's intended for code but it can be used for anything where formatting shouldn't be consideredI always wonder, does it really need the pipe? Why not just :&:& ?
This is why I should not be allowed to use Linux
most linux distros from android to alpine can be and often are configured to limit the amount of forks a user can spawn
on windows a forkbomb is literally %0|%0 iirc
How does that work?
%0 means your current command iirc so it just reexecutes itself piping its own output to the new instances
Please I do not need this information oh god what do I do now?
find your nearest school pc with like 8g ram
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB_s79lHSVs
Just a sentence, please kind sir, not a video?
Maybe he thought the topic was interesting and wanted to share more details with us? I appreciate the video.
Fork bombs are things that infinitely spawn new forks, until the system crashes. Its an infinite ‘if true, spawn new instance’ loop that only stops when the system gets a hard reset.
Is a fork bomb, it starts a process that starts two more processes, which each start two more processes, which each start two more processes, which each start two more processes…
And eventually the computer locks up plus it’s hard to kill since the PIDs change constantly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb
Self-replicating program, malicious
Its creating a function named : that spawns two copies of : then calls that function to start the duplicating code or forks. For that, its called a fork bomb.
It also backgrounds the process with &