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]’ ¶
‘--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 ‘-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!)
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 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
Maketo use up all available system resources:"-j [jobs]’ ¶ ‘--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 ‘-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
makecommand is technically only a problem when run for aMakefilethat tries to do too many things, and has at least one mistake in dependency controls. So… for everyMakefileI 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.