a fork bomb is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.

[...]

A classic example of a fork bomb is one written in Unix shell :(){ :|:& };:, possibly dating back to 1999, which can be more easily understood as

fork() { fork | fork & } fork

> 
> In it, a function is defined (fork()) as calling itself (fork), then piping (|) its result into itself, all in a background job (&amp;).
> 
> The code using a colon `:` as the function name is not valid in a shell as defined by POSIX, which only permits alphanumeric characters and underscores in function names. However, its usage is allowed in GNU Bash as an extension.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb)

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You're telling markdown to format the code in the language fork() { and then break the code block early by not having > in front of the next line. Here's a quoted code block formatted in sh:

fork() {
   fork | fork &
}
fork

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

It seems the app I use to browse doesn't play entirely nice with markdown. I updated my formatting a little, thanks for the notice.