this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
235 points (96.8% liked)

linuxmemes

21291 readers
840 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
    • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
    • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
    •  

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    235
    Gentoo users be like (sh.itjust.works)
    submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
    23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     
    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    It is driving me crazy that I have no idea what this means.

    [–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

    I believe the left hand is a shell fork-bomb, on the assumption that anything that zany is probably malicious.

    And the right hand is a way to tell Make to use up all available system resources:

    "-j [jobs]’ ¶
‘--jobs[=jobs]’
Specifies the number of recipes (jobs) to run simultaneously. With no argument, make runs as many recipes simultaneously as possible. If there is more than one ‘-j’ option, the last one is effective. See Parallel Execution, for more information on how recipes are run. Note that this option is ignored on MS-DOS."

    Edit: I think the make command is technically only a problem when run for a Makefile that tries to do too many things, and has at least one mistake in dependency controls. So... for every Makefile I ever encountered (or that I ever wrote!)

    Yeah. They're the same picture

    [–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    You are correct, left hand is a fork bomb. Specifically, it creates and then runs a function named ":". What this function does is pipe its output into itself while running in a background process, which instantly spawns infinite copies of itself. Technically I believe the : character could be any character as its just a name. The creator just picked a colon for aesthetics.

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

    Now I get why it does what it does and how it works. I never thought that the colon was the variable name but it makes so much sense!

    load more comments (1 replies)
    load more comments (3 replies)
    load more comments (3 replies)