annoyingC

Inspiration

In systems programming we learned about the signal() call, and I realized you could do some wild stuff with that. So I did. Also I saw an satire article on why linux viruses are so rare, the main joke was you were building it from source each time. I thought it would be fun to make something like that but without any teeth.

What it does

If you try to quit it it forks and then keeps going. It also will fork on its own if left alone. I like to think of it as a game, sort of a whack a mole for processes.

How I built it

I used C to build it, with vim, tmux and make as my main tools. Also git for source control.

Challenges I ran into

Unix is set up to keep you from doing things like this so fighting the OS was a challenge. I also fork bombed my laptop a couple of times. As I am writing this it is running in the background because I am not totally sure how to kill it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It is genuinely hard to quit out of and is fairly resilient.

What I learned

While C is a terrible language but it gives you a ton of control which can be fun for things like this. As an interesting thing, it randomizes its process name each time it forks and it is forking pretty much constantly so utilities like pkill are less than effective.