The DOOM system administration tool was written by a bored hacker at university of New Mexico, as a patch to the open-source DOOM engine. Each monster represents a running process, with the PID and name floating over his head. If a monster is wounded, the corresponding process is reniced, and if the monster dies, the process is killed. In the DOOM process manager, processes/monsters can defend themselves against the sysadmin, which makes killing processes more interesting than a quick kill -9.

In crowded systems, processes tend to start killing each other at random (the AI in DOOM isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer). Consider it process darwinism. The strong daemons survive to spawn child processes, and the weak perish and go to the bit bucket. Just hope that your X server is tougher than that rogue netscape process that's slowly devouring your free memory.

The code and a thorough explanation are posted at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

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