OSX Malicious Terminal Command (colon, brackets, curly brackets, apersand, etc)

Question

Ok, so someone "challenged" me to enter this into my OSX Terminal, but I have no idea what it would do:

WARNING to the reader: the following line can be harmful; do NOT enter it unless you know what you are doing:

:(){ :|:& };:

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It's a fork bomb. Don't do it. (Actually, as GB pointed out quickly, the copy here started out as a broken fork bomb. It was missing its final colon.) Still, if someone says, "Try this command" while snickering, and you don't know what it does, common sense says...

Edit: The one you have here is pretty famous as a work of art by Jaromil, a digital artist (so-called). Google around for lots of postmodern posturing about it, if you're bored.

Answer 2

Fork bomb!

I mean... fun bomb! Give it a try inside a virtual machine.

Answer 3

Absolutely nothing. It's an incomplete version of the "fork bomb", missing a colon at the end.

Answer 4

On properly configured systems it doesn't do much harm, you should be able to try it.

Answer 5

It does nothing harmful, since Mac OS X has a (per-user) upper bound for number of processes.