This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: fork bombs (was Re: cat in 69 characters, what can you do?)

---

Article: 7256 of alt.hackers
From: normat@marcus.its.rpi.edu (Tim Norman)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: fork bombs (was Re: cat in 69 characters, what can you do?)
Date: 26 Jan 1995 15:22:45 GMT
Organization: its
Lines: 22
Approved: oui
Message-ID: 3g8eo5$hf7@usenet.rpi.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: marcus.its.rpi.edu
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

---

Bruce James Robert Linley (linley@netcom.com) wrote:
: it was: main(){while(fork()>=0);}

I have a few friends at school here who love to fork bomb my Linux machine
at inoportune moments.  So, I coded up a quick program that runs as root,
nice -20.  It continually checks the load and the number of processes each
user is running.  If it gets too high, it kills off whoever is running the
most processes.  Works pretty well :-)

: Anyone care to try this in an isolated UNIX environment? I'm sure Netcom
: would frown upon such experiments on their machines.  :)

My "forkwatch" program killed it within 5 seconds.  Didn't get
a chance
to run kill 0 or kill -1. :-)

Tim
--
Tim Norman
Computer Science Major		Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
FDC Rafiki (rec.arts.disney)
Asante sana, squash banana!  We we nugu, mi mi apana!
<A href=http://www.rpi.edu/~normat/>My homepage</A>

---

gone gone gone gone

Back to index