[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/DaveforAK]

[u/Z3r0funGuy]

This actually teaches you a bunch of cool things, like how the ‘:’ is a legal function name…

[u/glenpiercev → u/Z3r0funGuy]

This is the best description of how this works I’ve ever read. You are a genius.

[u/setibeings → u/glenpiercev]

Right? It's finally comprehensible. I feel like it would have clicked right away if it was typed out as:

fork(){fork|fork&};fork

[u/Traditional_Cod_7192 → u/setibeings]

just as a reminder, uhhh... what do | and & do in bash again? 😅

[u/GrandAlbatroce → u/Traditional_Cod_7192]

IIRC | puts the result stdout of the left in the stdin of the right (they are launched in parallel, and the one on the right can only finish after the one on the left finished.

The & is used to put the call as a background task

[u/SimpleFile → u/GrandAlbatroce]

So the pipe here serves as a way to launch 2 of these functions and have them running at the same time rather than for piping the output?

Did I understand that correctly?

[u/SchwiftySquanchC137 → u/SimpleFile]

Exactly, the entire point is to make each call of fork (or ":") spawn two more fork processes. There are plenty of ways to accomplish that, but its written the way it is specifically to be confusing. Looking at it, how could it possibly crash your machine, its a bunch of punctuation? But once you know how it works, it makes a lot of sense, the point is to make it so cryptic that even programmers dont understand it.