3 ms·

Wouldn't `mv` in `mv /bin/sh /bin/sh.old` fail due to pidspace exhaustion from the fork bomb?

• adrianmonk 7y ago
  Well, you could sacrifice one of your (precious) currently-running shells by doing: exec mv /bin/sh /bin/sh.old
  • inetknght 7y ago
    ...assuming the forkbomb required the shell and the currently-running shell has permission then yes. That would work.
• g051051 7y ago
  It wasn't pid exhaustion...it was tying up too many resources on the server for it to serve the workstation requests. These were HP 9000 Series 300 workstations configured to share the disk on a "cluster server". You could also log into the server and run jobs, and that's what this guy had done. So while the admin still had control through an existing logon window, the rest of us were stopped because the system was wedged with the fork bomb.