[clug] what passes for entertainment...

[David Schoen]

2009/6/27 Hal Ashburner <hal.ashburner at gmail.com>:
> Ian Munsie wrote:
>>> Easier:
>>> :(){:|:&};:
>> BAD HAL!!! Don't encourage people to crash their computer!
>
> ...and there I was thinking I was being nice to the people new to linux.
> Anyone who ran it without first googling it, asking here, looking up their
> shell manuals and working through what it does, asking a friend or any other
> method for finding out what's going on would learn a lesson that they would
> remember and is unlikely to go cold in a hurry. As lessons go, that one
> won't actually do any real damage to desktop, laptop or home server machines
> or data.
> Now if you tried it on a production machine described as "Mission critical"
> without knowing what it was (what's with this fashion for "missions"
> anyway?) Then yes, you'd likely be fired. Best get that done sooner rather
> than later if you're in charge of such a machine and don't know any better.

While I mostly agree with you, have you ever actually tried googling
for that without already knowing what it did? When I first saw it, I
did. I couldn't find anything about it (due to how hard it is to
google for non-word symbols). Without knowing it's a fork-bomb people
would have to resort to looking up detailed bash syntax, depending on
what language(s) someone already knows and how much they have learnt
about bash it may not be obvious that ":(){...};" defines a function
called ":" or that "|" will create a pipe (wtf is a pipe?) and "&"
fork (mmm food) ... it definitely wasn't for me. Fortunately despite
deciding it was complete garble and wouldn't be capable of executing,
I only ran it on a live cd I didn't care about so what you've said
still holds :p

- Dave