Oops

[bellinghman]

I just accidentally wrote a fork bomb.

Thank goodness for the fact the process in question had enough of a bottleneck that it couldn't max-out both cores, so I was able to shut everything else down and log off cleanly.

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

Whoops.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

(The process was supposed to find out its own path and name, substitute a different actual filename, and execute that. Unfortunately, I neglected to use the updated name ...)

[vatine]

"Oooops"

[liasbluestone.livejournal.com]

Ooops, indeed...

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Doh!

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

That would have been embarrassing...

[jemck.livejournal.com]

I understand each individual word in that post but the meaning of the whole escapes me by about one astronomical unit.

No, don't try to explain, life is too short and anyway my brain will just start dribbling out of my ears.

I'm just entertained by the infinite variation of different people's lives. That's all. :)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

For the fun of it, I will attempt to analogize it.

Imagine our local postman who delivers parcels. He's pretty efficient, but very literal minded, just following whatever address details he's been given. But if he tries to deliver something somewhere where they've left a note on the door, he can be told to deliver it somewhere else instead.

So, one day, he tries to deliver a parcel to us at number 6 King James Way. Now, we know that we're going to be out when he arrives, so we leave a note on the door, telling him to deliver to number 4 instead.

So he walks back up the path. Then he looks at the address, mentally removes the '6' from our address and changes it to '4', and ends up delivering it to Brenda next door.

So far, so good.

But the next day, we again expect a parcel, and knowing Brenda will be out, but that Philippa at #8 will be in, we change the instructions.

But due to a slight error, we tell him to divert delivery not to #8, but to #6.

Our faithful postman walks down our path with the parcel, and reads the note. OK, not here, he needs to deliver it somewhere else. So he walks back up the path, looks at the address, changes the '6' to a '6', and reattempts delivery.

So he walks back down the path, sees the note, walks back up the path, ...

Sadly, he never gets back to the sorting office, and thus can never be told to stop.

In my case, the postman is the computer's operating system, and instead of delivering a parcel to a named address, it's to start a named program.

killall

[tsr2.livejournal.com]

I wonder if killall could have got them faster than they were forking? Or were you on a different OS?

Re: killall

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Windows. So yes.