Lessons for the day

[unixronin]

"A multi-gigahertz Athlon processor plus a tiny shell script with a minor syntax oversight can fork-bomb with terrifying speed."  Four thousand additional /bin/bash processes spawned in the two seconds or so before procmeter3 stopped responding...  the machine rebooted about twenty seconds later.

The error?  Oh, I had the script echo a usage string, "cool | uncool | recool", and forgot to quote it...

Comments

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

Its always those little things. ' not ` (or vice versa) has been my undoing a couple of times.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Forkbomb :(){ :|:& };:

I almost dd if=/dev/zero of=reallyimportantdrive

And the bitch is that ulimit will stop the fork bomb but will gleefully let dd kill important stuff.