C graffiti | Hacker News Reader

C graffiti

boingboing.net

31 pointsca98am7913 comments

At an initial glance it looks like a forkbomb, but it isn't. The program is never going to get past:

    for (;;) {
        printf blah blah
    }

So the fork() call is only going to get executed once. It just fills your screen with lots of text, which doesn't "fuck yo memry."

But wouldn't the forked process also fork another process (which would do the same...), thus, eventually "fucking yo memry"?

No -- both processes return from the fork() call (with different return values).

Both processes resume after the fork call, and both go into the loop. Only the return value from the fork call tells you which process you're in.

It is somewhat idiosyncratic that the snippet uses both while (1) and for (;;) for infinite looping, which seems to indicate less than total familiarity with C.

Ah, I was thinking the child process started from the beginning. I guess the artist was too.

It'd be funny to get some green spraypaint and submit a patch.

Nope, only a single child process is created, and the parent and child go into an infinite loop. And two processes stuck in finite loops do not fucked memry make.

Indeed. Only twice as much "damage" as one process stuck in an infinite loop.

It's funny. I saw this on Boing Boing earlier today, and I thought to myself, "you know one of the things I like about Hacker News is that this wouldn't rate a place on the front page on Hacker News".

Yeah, things have gotten worse lately, and up 'till about the last week, I was an ardent defender of "everything's just fine." C'est la vie.

I think one small part of the problem is that you can never be hurt by having a bad submission, and there's a risk of payoff, so why not submit something. Then, once it's here, even a few clicks can get front page payoff.

Be sure to check out the "Story of Mel," linked from one of the comments on the article:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

A bit more HN worthy than the buggy graffiti, perhaps.

most awful piece of graffiti ever, more so than people who have stupid tags.

agreed. a broken php template would have been much more funny and meaningful.

Wow, tough crowd... :)

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