Fork BomB -- FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Here comes the fork bomb, it will explode & crash your system within minutes.

$ :(){ :|: & };:

It’s actually a shell function;  :() denotes unnamed function with the body enclosed in {}. The statement ‘:|:’ makes a call to the function itself and pipes the output to another function call—which is the same function & puts all processes in the background and hence you can’t kill any process. Finally ‘;’ completes the function definition and the last ‘:’ initiates a call to this unnamed function. So it recursively creates processes and eventually your system will hang. This is one of the most dangerous Linux commands and may cause your computer to crash!

 Solution : How to avoid a fork bomb? Of course, by limiting the process limit; you need to edit /etc/security/limits.conf. Edit the variable nproc to user_name hard nproc 100. You require root privileges to modify this file.

Above code is same as ->

forkbomb(){forkbomb|forkbomb&}; forkbomb

Check out this video from youtube about fork bomb prank.