A fellow developer was burned today when an administrator ran a so-called “kill script” to free up some system resources. It got me thinking about another way to infuriate the users of the system. I wanted it to be a one liner so it could be quickly placed in a cron script. Here’s what I came up with:
# Joe Blo sucks --steve
*/15 * * * * ps aux | grep $(id --user jblo) | awk '{print $2}' | shuf | tail -1 | xargs kill -9 > /dev/null 2>&1
This effectively kills a random process belonging to target every 15 minutes. How infuriating is that? Make sure to leave a note so your victim knows who to blame.