How to protect Ubuntu from fork bomb

Posted by dblang on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by dblang
Published on 2011-01-27T15:44:08Z Indexed on 2012/07/04 15:24 UTC
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I heard someone talking about a fork bomb, I did some research and found some dreadful information about some strange looking characters people can have you type at the command line and as a result do bad things on the computer. I certainly would not issue commands I do not understand but one never knows what can happen.

I heard that some OS allows the administrator to place some limit on user processes to mitigate the effects of fork bombs, is this protection in Ubuntu by default or would a person with sudo privilege have to set this? If so, how?

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