CAUTION: Wicked powerful feature in Linux
I've worked with Linux since back around 1995 or 1996 and I was not aware of this feature until yesterday. Did you know that you can send commands directly into the Linux kernel via /proc/sysrq-trigger? You can instruct the kernel to perform such tasks as rebooting the kernel and crashing the system among many others. This winds up being very handy for testing purposes (and incredibly powerful).
Just don't invoke this command without first checking with your sysadmin or you might be heavily flogged.
It's also got a key sequence, typically ALT-SysRQ-[letter], but you might have to activate this via
ReplyDeleteecho 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
For more info about this, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key