Stupid bash tricks

The following is a very stupid bash command to run.

:(){:|:};:

This is a fork bomb, so don't run it without having set process limits.

I was trying to understand how this worked, and I found the following blog that set me straight. What was tricking me was the colon... it didn't look like it should be valid but it is. Who knew? Well, certainly not me.

The site I note above helpfully suggests changing the colon to "bomb", which gives us:

bomb() {
bomb | bomb
}; bomb

Stupid slashdot tricks

Well, only one. It looks like the Slashdot crew are bigger fans of Futurama than I realised!

I got this from a slashdot sig.

chris@ubuntu:~$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | netcat slashdot.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:23:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001237
X-Bender: Farewell, big blue ball of idiots!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

chris@ubuntu:~$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | netcat slashdot.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:24:02 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001237
X-Fry: People said I was dumb but I proved them!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

chris@ubuntu:~$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | netcat slashdot.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:24:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001237
X-Leela: There's a political debate on. Quick, change the channel!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

chris@ubuntu:~$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | netcat slashdot.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:24:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001237
X-Fry: Stop abducting me!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

chris@ubuntu:~$