Ministry of Silly Processes

A collection of processes that misbehave, act weirdly, or are just plain unnecessary. For use in testing or just to see if your system administration skills are up to par.

Of special note, the processes in this repository are split into two parts. The first set of processes are relatively benign. They do not access any non-transient resources and do not leave anything after their execution completes.

The second set of processes are harmful to your system. They will try to make your system break down in non-permanent ways. If you run these processes there is a good chance that your machine will stop responding so do not take these these lightly.

Setup

Clone this repository and run make to create the executables for your system. This will build the standard set of safe processes for usage. If you want to also create binaries for the dangerous set of processes then run make i-dont-need-warranty.

Usage

After compiling the processes they end up in the bin/ directory. You can them with ./bin/mosp-friendly.

To use the dangerous set of processes you will additionally need to confirm that you really want to to do this by providing an enviornment variable in the following way VOIDMYWARRANTY=1 ./bin/mosp-DANGER-pylons, these processes will not start if the environment variable is not set.

Introducing the processes

These processes are included with the Ministry of Silly Processes.

mosp-friendly

Exits immediately with exit code 0.

mosp-exit

Exits immediately with exit code 1.

mosp-forever

Sleeps forever then exits with code 0.

mosp-2020

Writes garbage on stdout, stderr, forever then exits with code 0.

mosp-nanana

Doesn't listen to any signals, sleeps forever, then exits with code 0.

mosp-segway

Immediately segfaults.

mosp-DANGER-pylons

Tries to consume all shared resources on the system, enters a busy loop, ignores all signals, and then exits with code 0.