fork bomb


fork bomb

(programming)A particular species of wabbit that can bewritten in one line of C:

main() for

or shell:

$0 & $0 &

on any Unix system, or occasionally created by an egregiouscoding bug. A fork bomb process "explodes" by recursivelyspawning copies of itself using the Unix system call"fork(2)". Eventually it eats all the process table entriesand effectively wedges the system. Fortunately, fork bombsare relatively easy to spot and kill, so creating onedeliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the justwrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator.

See also logic bomb.