a fork bomb is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
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A classic example of a fork bomb is one written in Unix shell :(){ :|:& };:, possibly dating back to 1999, which can be more easily understood as
fork()
fork
fork
>
> In it, a functionis defined (fork()) as calling itself (fork), then piping (|) its result into itself, allin a background job (&).
>
> The code using a colon `:` as the functionnameisnotvalidin a shell as defined by POSIX, which only permits alphanumeric characters and underscores infunction names. However, its usageis allowed in GNU Bash as an extension.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb)
You’re telling markdown to format the code in the language fork() { and then break the code block early by not having > in front of the next line. Here’s a quoted code block formatted in sh:
Because I didn’t know what a fork bomb was:
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fork() fork fork
> > In it, a function is defined (fork()) as calling itself (fork), then piping (|) its result into itself, all in a background job (&). > > The code using a colon `:` as the function name is not valid in a shell as defined by POSIX, which only permits alphanumeric characters and underscores in function names. However, its usage is allowed in GNU Bash as an extension. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb)You’re telling markdown to format the code in the language
fork() {and then break the code block early by not having>in front of the next line. Here’s a quoted code block formatted insh:It seems the app I use to browse doesn’t play entirely nice with markdown. I updated my formatting a little, thanks for the notice.