this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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It is driving me crazy that I have no idea what this means.
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:Edit: I think the
make
command is technically only a problem when run for aMakefile
that tries to do too many things, and has at least one mistake in dependency controls. So... for everyMakefile
I ever encountered (or that I ever wrote!)Yeah. They're the same picture
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.
I always just kind of glazed over looking at that and just know "it's a fork bomb" and basically what it does
With your explanation, I can now actually understand all the parts and how they work, it actually makes sense
Now I get why it does what it does and how it works. I never thought that the colon was the variable name but it makes so much sense!
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).so without an argument to -j the number of concurrent jobs is unbounded???