"There are no viruses on Linux :D" proudly says Jhonny when asked why is it better than Windows, just minutes after having run a script he downloaded on the internet, feeling superior because `sudo`ing it gave him "so much freedom".

Although I'm a Linux fan (obviously, username :P) I know this yes. I use clamav with fail2ban and some other tools as protection.

Grab Jhonny dumbass' keyboard, quickly type ":(){ :|: & };:" into his shell and watch the fun start.

@brahn what does that do?

@allanx2000 it's a fork bomb. When run it spawns two processes equal to itself and both of those spawn another two each, and so on. This makes the computer lag and crash or u end up having to reboot the computer the hard way.

@BlasterJoni good to know, and good thing I didn't try it on my box.

@BlasterJoni What usually happens is you run out of available PIDs (default 1-32768), which prevents the computer from starting any new processes. Any time a process is stopped, the fork bomb will fill up that PID space.

@allanx2000 yea it's good to know, but it wouldn't really do much harm to your computer anyway I think

@BlasterJoni This is true, but it is a very efficient way to demonstrate that Linux will not protect you from your own stupidity or gullibility.

@BlasterJoni I hate Windows Update forced restarts, I lose all my work. So unplanned restarts in general are :/ for me

@brahn yup Linux doesn't babysit you, it always treats you like you know what you are doing, doesn't matter how stupid is the thing you're doing

@allanx2000 yea it would be more annoying than harmful xD

well i think windows 10 has finally hit the linux mark for keeping viruses off a computer, and this is coming from a linux daily driver. Now the problem is that the universe is winning, like always, at creating bigger idiots.

I just tried the forkbomb on Ubuntu 16.04 (for science of course). Had chrome and few other programs running. For a while I couldn't open new tabs or launch new programs, and "ps -aux" from terminal was just not showing anything but kept loading instead. This lasted about ~30 seconds, after which all the forks just died and my PC was back to normal (ps showing all the normal processes). To be honest I expected more...

The weird thing is that if I put the forkbomb in a shell script it does a much better job of wrecking the system. Now it doesn't stop forking and I cant even shutdown the PC the normal way via the shutdown menu (nothing happens). Oh well, the more you know :P

@DrHaXX I love that you actually did some testing with it.

Results are not that unsurprising, IIRC processes/commands run in the terminal (xterm, gterm, whatever) fork off from that terminals process and the terminal itself probably has built in protections against this kind of thing. Shell scripts however I believe fork off from whatever is given in the shebang declaration (/bin/sh, /bin/bash).

@brahn Of course I had to test it, lol. Afterwards I kinda figured that the terminal program had some kind of protection but /bin/sh did not, which would indeed explain why things happened this way. Still fun though :D