239
Gentoo users be like (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 38 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

I believe the left hand is a shell fork-bomb, on the assumption that anything that zany is probably malicious.

And the right hand is a way to tell Make to use up all available system resources:

"-j [jobs]’ ΒΆ
β€˜--jobs[=jobs]’
Specifies the number of recipes (jobs) to run simultaneously. With no argument, make runs as many recipes simultaneously as possible. If there is more than one β€˜-j’ option, the last one is effective. See Parallel Execution, for more information on how recipes are run. Note that this option is ignored on MS-DOS."

Edit: I think the make command is technically only a problem when run for a Makefile that tries to do too many things, and has at least one mistake in dependency controls. So... for every Makefile I ever encountered (or that I ever wrote!)

Yeah. They're the same picture

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    You are correct, left hand is a fork bomb. Specifically, it creates and then runs a function named ":". What this function does is pipe its output into itself while running in a background process, which instantly spawns infinite copies of itself. Technically I believe the : character could be any character as its just a name. The creator just picked a colon for aesthetics.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I think it can also get weird when you call other makefiles, like if you go make -j64 at the top level and that thing goes on to call make on subprojects, that can be a looooot of threads of that -j gets passed down. So even on that 64 core machine, now you have possibly 4096 jobs going, and it surfaces bugs that might not have been a problem when we had 2-4 cores (oh no, make is running 16 jobs at once, the horror).

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