In computing, a fork bomb (also called rabbit virus) is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
Around 1978, an early variant of a fork bomb called wabbit was reported to run on a System/360. It may have descended from a similar attack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington. [1]
Fork bombs operate both by consuming CPU time in the process of forking, and by saturating the operating system's process table. [2] [3] A basic implementation of a fork bomb is an infinite loop that repeatedly launches new copies of itself.
In Unix-like operating systems, fork bombs are generally written to use the fork system call. [3] As forked processes are also copies of the first program, once they resume execution from the next address at the frame pointer, they continue forking endlessly within their own copy of the same infinite loop; this has the effect of causing an exponential growth in processes. As modern Unix systems generally use a copy-on-write resource management technique when forking new processes, [4] a fork bomb generally will not saturate such a system's memory.
Microsoft Windows operating systems do not have an equivalent functionality to the Unix fork system call; [5] a fork bomb on such an operating system must therefore create a new process instead of forking from an existing one.
A classic example of a fork bomb is one written in Unix shell :(){ :|:& };:
, possibly dating back to 1999, [6] which can be more easily understood as
fork(){fork|fork&} fork
In it, a function is defined (fork()
) as calling itself (fork
), then piping (|
) its result into itself, all in a background job (&
).
The code using a colon :
as the function name is not valid in a shell as defined by POSIX, which only permits alphanumeric characters and underscores in function names. [7] However, its usage is allowed in GNU Bash as an extension. [8]
As a fork bomb's mode of operation is entirely encapsulated by creating new processes, one way of preventing a fork bomb from severely affecting the entire system is to limit the maximum number of processes that a single user may own. On Linux, this can be achieved by using the ulimit utility; for example, the command ulimit -u 30
would limit the affected user to a maximum of thirty owned processes. [9] On PAM-enabled systems, this limit can also be set in /etc/security/limits.conf
, [10] and on *BSD, the system administrator can put limits in /etc/login.conf
. [11] Modern Linux systems also allow finer-grained fork bomb prevention through cgroups and process number (PID) controllers. [12]
Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. The shell's name is an acronym for Bourne-Again SHell, a pun on the name of the Bourne shell that it replaces and the notion of being "born again". First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions and it was one of the first programs Linus Torvalds ported to Linux, alongside GCC. It is available on nearly all modern operating systems.
Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows.
A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. The shell is both an interactive command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to control the execution of the system using shell scripts.
The Bourne shell (sh
) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
Almquist shell is a lightweight Unix shell originally written by Kenneth Almquist in the late 1980s. Initially a clone of the System V.4 variant of the Bourne shell, it replaced the original Bourne shell in the BSD versions of Unix released in the early 1990s.
In Unix-like and some other operating systems, the pwd
command writes the full pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.
In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C standard library wrapper to the fork, clone, or other system calls of the kernel. Fork is the primary method of process creation on Unix-like operating systems.
In computer programming, glob patterns specify sets of filenames with wildcard characters. For example, the Unix Bash shell command mv *.txttextfiles/
moves all files with names ending in .txt
from the current directory to the directory textfiles
. Here, *
is a wildcard and *.txt
is a glob pattern. The wildcard *
stands for "any string of any length including empty, but excluding the path separator characters ".
In computing, time
is a command in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is used to determine the duration of execution of a particular command.
In some operating systems, including Unix-like systems, a pseudoterminal, pseudotty, or PTY is a pair of pseudo-device endpoints (files) which establish asynchronous, bidirectional communication (IPC) channel between two or more processes.
In computing, kill
is a command that is used in several popular operating systems to send signals to running processes.
A command shell is a command-line interface to interact with and manipulate a computer's operating system.
In computing, a shell builtin is a command or a function, called from a shell, that is executed directly in the shell itself, instead of an external executable program which the shell would load and execute.
In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark at the beginning of a script. It is also called sharp-exclamation, sha-bang, hashbang, pound-bang, or hash-pling.
In computing, exec is a functionality of an operating system that runs an executable file in the context of an already existing process, replacing the previous executable. This act is also referred to as an overlay. It is especially important in Unix-like systems, although it also exists elsewhere. As no new process is created, the process identifier (PID) does not change, but the machine code, data, heap, and stack of the process are replaced by those of the new program.
In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, type
is a command that describes how its arguments would be interpreted if used as command names.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
Getopt is a C library function used to parse command-line options of the Unix/POSIX style. It is a part of the POSIX specification, and is universal to Unix-like systems. It is also the name of a Unix program for parsing command line arguments in shell scripts.
In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, printf is a shell builtin that formats and outputs text like the same-named C function.
OpenRC is a dependency-based init system for Unix-like computer operating systems. It was created by Roy Marples, a NetBSD developer who was also active in the Gentoo project. It became more broadly adopted as an init system outside of Gentoo following the decision by some Linux distributions not to adopt systemd.
bash$ :(){ :|:&};:}
Name: In the shell command language, a word consisting solely of underscores, digits, and alphabetics from the portable character set. The first character of a name is not a digit.
When the shell is in POSIX mode (see Bash POSIX Mode), fname must be a valid shell name and may not be the same as one of the special builtins (see Special Builtins). In default mode, a function name can be any unquoted shell word that does not contain '$'.