http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=414630


in reply to Re: Re: The best part of waking up?
in thread The best part of waking up?

Sure my reply is about a year late but I'm amazed that no one posted a comment about : () { :|:& };: because it's a fork bomb in one line of bash. (The colon is a valid function name.)

Since this thread was just linked to by Funniest Nodes of 2004 I'm going to reply with this warning. Otherwise I would be tempted to hope as few people saw the command as possible.

I mean I catch the irony in your post saying you hope people don't run a dangerous command and then including such a command yourself. I find that funny but I'd rather not have people run it on machines they shouldn't by accident.

I did run a fork bomb I wrote in C on my 486 before I formated the drive a while ago. It was running Slackware 4.0 and even the caps-lock lights and control-alt-delete stopped responding.