[TUHS] hello, world

Corey Lindsly corey at lod.com
Wed Dec 28 10:53:44 AEST 2011


> On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 08:10:04AM -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
> > Rather a nice tribute to Dennis and C, published
> > in the New York Times Magazine:
> > 
> > http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-lives-they-lived.html?ref=magazine#view=dennis_ritchie
> 
> Yes, a good reminder on the power that programming brings us. A question
> though: what command would "bring the system down"?

The one that has stuck with me since the first time I read it 30 years ago
is from an article titled "On the Security of UNIX" (dmr, 1978?) ... 

  Here is a particularly ghastly shell sequence guaranteed
  to stop the system:
    
    while :; do
      mkdir x
      cd x
    done

  Either a panic will occur because all the i-nodes on the
  device are used up, or all the disk blocks will be consumed,
  thus preventing anyone from writing files on the device.

(from the UNIX programmer's manual, vol.2 p.592)

---corey



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