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

▲ meindnoch 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	jcynix 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And especially the ulimit command mentioned, which is mostly unknown to folks nowadays, it seems.

▲ dcminter 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 :'(

	▲	jcims 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have it on a tshirt. Pretty sure most people think it's just an emotional rant in emoji form.

▲ Normal_gaussian 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I prefer

    u(){u|u&};u

AKA, fork u.

▲ jez 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	jcims 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		One way to find out!

▲ mitchell_h 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ ogogmad 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The reboot was as hard as the lesson.

I'm confused. What happened on reboot?

▲

Normal_gaussian 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jcims 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah the days before journaling filesystems, a moment to consider your actions as fsck did its best to clean up the mess you made.