Almost 3 years ago, I wrote about how to forkbomb with R. A quick recap is that a forkbomb is a low-tier, malicious misuse of a system; sort of a “baby’s first denial of service”. The idea is that you write a program that will start an entirely new copy of itself each time it is executed. Executing it will quickly gobble up all available resources, generally locking up the system.

Naturally this is one of my favorite things ever.

Perhaps the most famous forkbomb is the one for *NIX shell by Denis Roio:

:(){ :|:& };:

Many people consider this small piece of malicious code a work of art. Wait until they see the “art” my cat makes when he wants me to stop programming (I kid; I actually think it’s beautiful).

The way it basically works is that :(){} is defining a function, which works by calling itself recursively in the background (via fork), causing your system to spawn shells until it’s overwhelmed. With magrittr, we can kind of emulate this syntax:

library(parallel)
library(magrittr)

"&" <- function(.) parallel:::mcfork(T)
":" <- function(.) {\`&\`() %>% \`:\`()};\`:\`()

I admit it’s far from a perfect match, but it’ll do.  Because of the call to fork, this will only work on *NIX-likes (i.e., not Windows).  If you want to test this, I would recommend setting ulimit -u 1000 (or thereabouts) in your shell first.  Last I heard Macs do something like this by default.

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