4 ms·
This was a right of passage for CS students when I was in school - to (usually) accidentally write one when trying to implement some server or service. Fortunat
by fred_is_fred 7y ago
This was a right of passage for CS students when I was in school - to (usually) accidentally write one when trying to implement some server or service. Fortunately most "modern" UNIX systems at our school by then (mid 1990s) had per user process limits so you'd just screw yourself up.
- notyourday 7y agoIn my school it was my "Since there are limits and no one can tell me what they are, I can figure them out by counting the number of forks that I did until it blocks" that made our head sysadmin try figuring out how to add the limits
- jacquesm 7y agoHm. The way I got introduced to fork bombs was someone asking me in their most innocent voice: "what kind of output do you think this will generate?".
- adenner 7y agoThe real issue is even with the limits, when the entire operating systems class was learning about forking it was really easy for a distributed fork bomb to occur.
- hinkley 7y agoinitd also had a habit of killing child processes once the parent dies so even if you lock yourself up you could in theory log out and just wait a while (unless you nohup the process, then you are fucked) No such luck for the first guy I knew who fork-bombed himself on a Sequent.