« Subversion tips for today
Calling Inno Setup from the command line »

Python Madness - Crash your computer in just 3 lines of code

So a coworker mentioned he wanted a file that would launch multiple programs for him. Being helpful like I am, I whipped up a quick Python script:

import os
os.startfile(”C:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe”)
os.startfile(”C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe”)
#…etc

I sent it off to him and he was happy. But being curious as I am, I decided to make the script call itself and see what would happen…

File: startfiles.py

import os
os.startfile(”startfiles.py”)
os.startfile(”startfiles.py”)

Warning, save all your work on your computer before you try running this!

And here are my results: (can you beat my 258 processes?)

Python Maddness

–

del.icio.us |  Digg |  FURL |  Yahoo! My Web 2.0 |  Reddit

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 5:25 pm and is filed under other, Answer my searches, Answers, Python, humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Python Madness - Crash your computer in just 3 lines of code”

  1. Tom Says:
    September 20th, 2005 at 1:19 pm

    You can do this in c too by recursively calling fork() :)

  2. Brian Says:
    September 21st, 2005 at 6:38 am

    This is the equivalent of the old unix classic fork bomb:
    #!/bin/sh
    $0 & $0

  3. Uchi Says:
    June 18th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Hmm, to bad this didn’t crash my computer. I guess I have to much memory. ;)

  4. Greg - CEO/Founder Says:
    June 18th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    Uchi, what happened? Did your computer at least slow down to the point where you couldn’t use it?

  5. Computer Maintenance Tips Says:
    December 6th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    Computer Maintenance Tips…

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…