this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
152 points (94.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43963 readers
1616 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
:(){:|:&};:
That 'amp;' does not belong in there, it's probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.
What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called ":" (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.
It's a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there's some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don't know how from the top of my head.
It's a lemmy problem
I think however you're accessing Lemmy is rendering it wrong. I see the usual function.
I think poor Lemmy is trying to help URL encode your fork bomb lol
I was going to suggest a fork bomb, but it is recovered easily. Then I thought about inserting a fork bomb into
.profile, or better, into a boot process script, like:That could be pretty nasty. But still, pretty easy to recover from, so not really "destructive."
Came here for this one. Not the most destructive, but certainly the most elegant.