Not on a competently-run (multiuser) system, which will have process limits etc in place.

Indeed. I'm wondering if the parent attack somehow bypasses open file hard limits.

Am I the only one who initially thought this was a sequence of emoticons?

I'm not sure why : has been chosen as the canonical fork bomb function name, but it's more readable with something like

resurse() { recurse | recurse &}; recurse

In this example, the poor readability is a feature. Nevertheless the ":" character is bash inner function, which tells the shell to do nothing (except the arguments expansion), like pass in python. This means that you can redefine it and use it to confuse others. Most of other special characters are not functions so you are not able to redefine them that easily.

And it's usually accompanied by the adjective "elegant", which I find rather baffling.

"Cute" or "cryptic", perhaps.

Confuse the computer by making it sad?

haha yes I can see it now. Its a bash function that gets called recursively. Nice and simple, I've tested it in a few different environments, linux 2.4, linux 2.6, open bsd, solaris. All vanilla installs. Solaris is the only one I havent seen die.

For the uninitiated see the Wikipedia entry on "fork bombs"

u mind sharing what ":(){:|:&}; :&" means?

:() is a function that accepts no arguments, it calls itself (recursion) then pipes the output to another call to itself that is backgrounded, basically two calls to the function. That is the function definition, it is then called and backgrounded via :&

I am a true believer in the power of bash and despite the fact that it is not a programming language I will still try use it in that form just for fun.