this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] counselwolf@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't remember this exactly but when I was around 10 years old (circa 2007), me and my friends were playing around this ".bat" file that you create using notepad with a specific line which I forgot but essentially restarts your PC when you run the bat file.

We had some laughs during computer class.

During student council meeting, I had the chance to use the teacher/advisor's PC and of course tried this .bat thing for some laughs. Unfortunately this PC was older or something because when I ran the .bat file it didn't just restart the PC but ran into a significant error (I think some important files got deleted). Good thing no one noticed I tinkered with the PC, because the teacher was flustered.

[โ€“] yetAnotherUser@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yeah, me and my friends did that too, a decade later. We used something like shutdown -s -t [time] though.

We used to put this file into the shared folder everyone could access, made it hidden, created a shortcut, changed the shortcut's image to a folder and renamed it to something along the lines of "maths test solutions".

We also made some other .bat files which looked like this:

powerpoint
powerpoint
powerpoint
powerpoint
โ‹ฎ
[โ€“] lel@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Related to the second one, I made a batch file that opened a whole bunch of pictures of cows in paint, then opened a copy of itself, then looped, so that infinitely many cow pictures would open, and it would open exponentially more of them per loop as time went on. It would usually bluescreen a school computer in about 15 or 20 seconds. Did the same folder icon thing.

I put it in my student drive as a landmine to protect myself after I had told a lot of people that the admin had fucked up and all students were able to read and write to each other's drives. This had rapidly become bedlam, so I hid all my stuff in a maze of hidden folders and shortcuts that had copies of this cow file as dead-ends.

Unfortunately, people who ran into this cow file thought it was cool, so they started dropping it into each other's drives to blue screen each other's computers. Eventually, the school admin figured out what was happening and fixed the privileges, so everyone stopped being able to write to each other's drives, but they could still read. Weeks later, when searching for games in someone else's files, he accidentally triggered the cow file, crashing his computer and apparently losing dozens of hours of unsaved work.

Since all they'd copied was a shortcut, it was still pointing to a file in my drive, so I was the one who got in trouble. Which is fair. For months my computer privileges were taken away lol

[โ€“] XEAL@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Add the -f option so that Windows doesn't ask you to close shit.