Hacker News Reader

Comment by mustpax | Hacker News Reader

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."

View on HN

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

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com