:(){ :|:& };:

Tempting though, isn't it ?

That's not a problem to read, and it's really easy to recognize since everyone's been sent it at some point in their life.

For those having trouble:

    bomb() {
      bomb | bomb &  # spawns two subprocesses, each running bomb
                     # on one end of a pipe, neither will die
                     # so long as the other exists
    }
    bomb             # kick off the bomb

On any system with sane defaults for limits this won't crash the machine merely bog it down a tad.

I've successfully ran it on FreeBSD machines without any issues, now on Linux or Mac OS X it is bad news :P

Hm? Though on Linux I'm sure it varies from distro to distro, my Fedora 10 box has ulimit -u at 1024, and my OSX 10.6 install has it at 266 (2^8 + 10? Wonder how they decided on that number).

(And yes, I tried forkbombing them for the hell of it, both systems took it entirely in stride, as would be expected.)

Does anyone know of any current distros that don't set a sensible process limit in the default install?

On both Debian and Ubuntu `ulimit -u` returns `unlimited` for me.