I'm trying to understand the difference between a fork bomb and a process that continuously feeds data back into its own pipe. A fork bomb rapidly creates new processes, exhausting the system's process limit. Would a self-referential pipeline behave similarly, or would it remain a single process and simply loop or block? I'm mainly interested in the operating-system concepts involved, such as process creation, pipes, file descriptors, buffering, and resource limits. Please keep examples safe for testing in an isolated environment.
2 Answers
For safe experiments, study the behavior inside a disposable virtual machine or container with strict CPU, memory, process, and file-descriptor limits. You can inspect process counts and pipe behavior without intentionally launching an uncontrolled loop. Tools such as resource limits, tracing utilities, and small bounded producer-consumer programs are safer ways to observe what is happening.
The important distinction is between data flow and execution flow. A pipeline passes bytes between already-running commands, while process creation requires a system call or shell operation that starts another process. A self-feeding pipeline is therefore closer to an infinite I/O loop than to a fork bomb. It could still exhaust resources through unbounded output, buffering, open file descriptors, or CPU usage.
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