November 4, 2025
Infinite zips, infinite drama
Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)
A self-copying zip sparks nostalgia, mischief, and “will it trap AI bots?” vibes
TLDR: Russ Cox’s self-reproducing zip file—software that contains itself—has the crowd split between nostalgic awe and prank ideas. Commenters debate quines versus fork bombs and joke about using it to snare AI scrapers, turning a clever puzzle into a playful fight over art vs. chaos.
Russ Cox dusted off a 2010 brain-twister: a zip file that literally contains itself—like the old “turtles all the way down” tale, but make it software. His r.zip loops forever, a clever nod to “quines,” programs that output their own code. The comments wasted zero time turning it into a spectacle. One camp is pure nostalgia: devs gushed about finally rediscovering this legendary file, treating it like a collector’s item for nerds. Another camp? Chaos gremlins. They joked about weaponizing it as a “zip bomb” (a file that explodes in size when opened) to snare bots scraping the web for training data—aka the modern-day “AI scrapers.”
Then came the spicy debate: are “fork bombs” (tiny scripts that clone themselves until a computer chokes) the edgy cousin of quines, or a totally different beast? One commenter name-dropped a separate brainy post about image recognition as a vibe check for how deep this rabbit hole goes, while others flexed their old-school hacker cred with cheeky one-liners. The mood swings between art exhibit and prank toolkit, with a side of glee at the idea of compressing chaos into a single click. It’s equal parts museum piece and mischief starter, and the crowd is loving the drama.
Key Points
- •The article introduces r.zip, a self-reproducing ZIP file containing another ZIP at r/r.zip, forming a loop.
- •A gzipped tar counterpart, r.tar.gz, provides the same recursive behavior for Unix users.
- •The post connects self-reproducing archives to quines, self-printing programs known since the 1960s.
- •Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award address is cited for formulating the shortest self-reproducing program challenge.
- •The author begins a Python example, starting with a simple print statement, to build toward a quine.