ASCII Shell Forkbomb

Forkbomb
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This forkbomb is a kind of poetic virus. If its visually attractive line of only thirteen characters is entered into the command line of a Unix system and the enter key is pressed, within seconds the computer will crash because the devious little program commands it to make multiple copies of itself, setting off a chain reaction and thus quickly exhausting the system’s resources.

"Forkbombs have been popular entertainment among hackers since about the mid-1990s, but Jaromil manages to condense them to a most terse, poetic syntax, arguably the most elegant forkbomb ever written. [...] It has become a secret code of recognition among the initiated, like the stuffed trumpet of the Tristero underground postal network in Thomas Pynchon's novel Crying of Lot 49." - Florian Cramer

"It may seem to be a piece of symbolic 'writing' without any audience other than the interpretive processes within a computer that will interpret and execute its commands. However, it is the lack of a visual component in the 'lifespan' of the code and its effects on involved human, as well as machine, audiences affected by its execution that make this composition, with all its relatively unfamiliar syntax and minimalistic logical style, so intriguing." - Kevin Brock