Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X’ed them… and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X’ed, the following sequence of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! (Robin Hood)
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id3: Thank you, my good fellow! (Robin)
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently-slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter… only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
Someone’s put a fork bomb in their
.bashrcand you were summoned to fix it on a running system.-Classic hacker bedtime story