How do you make your UNIX crash ???

[Tim Ramsey]

[ diverging a bit, so I added alt.folklore.computers to the Newsgroups: and
  Followup-To: ]

In article <513 at bria>:

>In an article, tndsyd.oz.au!berny (Berny Goodheart) writes:
>>I am interested in finding out known ways to make your version of UNIX
>>crash.

>	time(&now);
>	if ( (fd = open("/dev/kmem",O_RDWR)) == -1 )
>		return(1);
>	while ( write(fd,&now,sizeof(long)) == sizeof(long) )
>		;

A couple of years ago in an extreme fit of boredom, on an unused ATT 3B2/400
running SysV 3.1, I did the following:

  hack# yes > /dev/kmem

(where yes just writes a stream of "y\n" to stdout)

Nothing happened.  I let it run for a couple of minutes with no apparent
effect.  Perhaps the writes weren't moving the seek pointer in kmem, so it
wasn't writing over anything interesting.  I wasn't energetic enough to
find out.  All in all, it didn't help my boredom. :)

--
Tim Ramsey (tar at math.ksu.edu)  (913) 532-6750 (voice)  (913) 532-7004 (FAX)
Department of Mathematics, Kansas State University, Manhattan KS 66506-2602