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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of my rather memorable introduction to special characters invoking functions, seeing this dastardly little quip in the email signature of someone in a mailing list (circa '95 or so).

    :(){:|:&};:

My curiosity piqued, I pasted it into the shell on my terminal in a pure example of FAFO. The poor little Sparc 5 I was using ground to a halt over the course of about ten seconds. The reboot was as hard as the lesson. xD

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Context: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/understanding-bash-fork-bomb/

And especially the ulimit command mentioned, which is mostly unknown to folks nowadays, it seems.

I have this printed on a sweatshirt - it saddens me a little that people who get it are so few and far between these days :'(

I have it on a tshirt. Pretty sure most people think it's just an emotional rant in emoji form.

Something I never understood about this: is the pipe necessary, or just to have another symbol contributing to the mayhem?

    :(){:&;:};:

This is the same number of characters but doesn’t use a pipe, and I was never able to figure out why it seems so universally to use a pipe.

Having a pipe will also eat up your system's file table, so it's potentially more efficient.

One way to find out!

I prefer

    u(){u|u&};u

AKA, fork u.

such nostalgia. There was a time when you could tell a fair bit about someone if that was in their email signature.

> The reboot was as hard as the lesson.

I'm confused. What happened on reboot?

A hard reboot is where the power goes all the way off, a soft reboot is where it doesn't. A fork bomb makes it very hard / impossible to trigger a soft reboot, forcing you to do a hard reboot.

As an extra sting, a hard reboot can be damaging if the software and hardware is not correctly handling power interruption, which was much more likely in the 90's.

To clarify a little - a hard reboot in this case is not performed by issuing a shutdown power off command, which is safe, but by pulling the plug from the wall (the worst shutdown) or holding the switch down (quite bad).

Yeah the days before journaling filesystems, a moment to consider your actions as fsck did its best to clean up the mess you made.

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