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
[download]

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