In my network programming class we are learning about processes and signals.  We have just recently learned about fork bombs.  I thought I would just share a little of my findings with regards to this intriguing concept.

Basically a fork bomb is when you computer creates too many processes so that the operating system is not able to function.  On the wikipedia article, they give numerous examples of how to create these very simple wabbits.   I decided to give this a few of these a shot on both my mac and pc.  First on the mac I ran both the shell fork bomb and perl fork bomb.  I am happy to report that as I watch my process list (ps) grow very quickly… the bomb was quickly defused.  On my windows box, the results were not as nice.  In plain, I just got done restarting the box.  I was able to move the mouse and select icons just fine, but right clicking anything, ctrl-alt-del… not going to happen.

There are some interesting concepts in the programming class, I like it.