If this abended your system as a NON-root user, then a) your system does not have well engineered OOM behaviour b) your sysadmins have not set proper ulimits and c) its scary that a fork bomb could fuxor a modern system.

Update Not many modern systems call it abend any more either, so my previous comment may be redundant RH is fairly "modern", so...

# redhat 6.2 system $ ulimit -a core file size (blocks) 1000000 data seg size (kbytes) unlimited file size (blocks) unlimited max memory size (kbytes) unlimited stack size (kbytes) 8192 cpu time (seconds) unlimited max user processes 2048 pipe size (512 bytes) 8 open files 1024 virtual memory (kbytes) 2105343
Note that my max user processes is a bit high at 2048. a more normal value for a multi user machine would be < 256, but special circumustances would modify that.
--
Jay "Yohimbe" Thorne, alpha geek for UserFriendly

In reply to Re: One Liner by Yohimbe
in thread One Liner by dsb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.