Bash fork bomb syntax meaning

Not that I want to actually do this, but what exactly does

:\(){ :\|:& };:

*do* to kick off a fork bomb? Just trying to better understand. I've escaped out a couple characters to prevent them from resolving as smiley faces in my post, but you get the idea of what I'm asking. :)

Thanks,
Jeff

I don't think those backslashes should be there,they're just escape characters.

The colon is an alias for the true command. This is creating a function that splits off and runs itself again. By running asynchronously it continues to multiply at a geometric rate until all of the capacity of the machine is consumed. In modern systems this is prevented through use of ulimit which limits how many processes a user can have.

Code:

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:(){};

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Means that you're defining a function, and the function definition is between the curly braces.

The function definition,

Code:

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:|:&

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, means that the function first calls itself, and then passes the output to another version of itself, which is then backgrounded (that's what the & does).

After the function definition, the function is then called by using it's name, :.

The following,

Code:

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forkbomb(){forkbomb|forkbomb&}; forkbomb

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would do the same thing except I've called the function "forkbomb", instead of the much harder to read ":".

Thanks. Really works great when run by root. Now I have to break out the big hammer to get my AIX box back.