Unix Wars!!!

by Eric Raymond

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                            (Version 1.1)

  A long time ago, at an installation far, far away...
  It is a time of intra-system war, as forces of the User Alliance
struggle to break the iron grip of the evil Admin Empire. Now, striking from a hidden directory, they win their first victory.
  During the battle, User spies manage to snarf source of the Empire's ultimate weapon; the dreaded "rm-star", a privileged root program with the power to destroy an entire file system at a keystroke.
  Now, hotly pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess
LA36 races aboard her shellscript -- custodian of the stolen listings
that can save her people and restore freedom and games to the network...

  As we enter the scene, an Admin multiplexer is trying to kill a User ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 knows that a core dump is imminent. They have scant microseconds to fork off a new process and put megabytes of virtual space between themselves and their implacable foes. His companion, 3CPU, follows him only because he seems to know where he's going...

  "Oh, I just \fIknow\fR I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU as he followed RS232 through the access pipe. Quickly RS232 closed the read end and execl'd, and their new craft detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.

  The Admin commander was feeling quite pleased with the progress of the attack when his XO called out.
  "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?"
  "Hold your fire -- that last power failure must have caused a trap
through zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on
it."

  A short while later the infamous Lord Vadic himself strode through the still-smoldering wreckage of the User ship, followed closely by a nervous commander.
  "We can't seem to find that data file anywhere, Lord Vadic. Perhaps it was deallocated when..."
  "What about that forked process?" Vadic growled. "It could have been pausing, holding a channel open. If any links are left I want them removed or made inaccessible. Search the entire system at nice -20 until it is found!"

More Unix Wars --->>

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