What is %0|%0 and how does it work?

If you run a .bat or .cmd file with %0|%0 inside, your computer starts to use a lot of memory and after several minutes, is restarted. Why does this code block your Windows? And what does this code programmatically do? Could it be considered a "bug"?

This is the Windows version of a fork bomb.

%0 is the name of the currently executing batch file. A batch file that contains just this line:

%0|%0

Is going to recursively execute itself forever, quickly creating many processes and slowing the system down.

This is not a bug in windows, it is just a very stupid thing to do in a batch file.

This is known as a fork bomb. It keeps splitting itself until there is no option but to restart the system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb

What it is:

%0|%0 is a fork bomb. It will spawn another process using a pipe | which runs a copy of the same program asynchronously. This hogs the CPU and memory, slowing down the system to a near-halt (or even crash the system).

How this works:

%0 refers to the command used to run the current program. For example, script.bat

A pipe | symbol will make the output or result of the first command sequence as the input for the second command sequence. In the case of a fork bomb, there is no output, so it will simply run the second command sequence without any input.

Expanding the example, %0|%0 could mean script.bat|script.bat. This runs itself again, but also creating another process to run the same program again (with no input).

%0 will never end, but it never creates more than one process because it instantly transfers control to the 2nd batch script (which happens to be itself).

But a Windows pipe creates a new process for each side of the pipe, in addition to the parent process. The parent process can't finish until each side of the pipe terminates. So the main program with a simple pipe will have 3 processes. You can see how the bomb quickly get's out of control if each side of the pipe recursively calls the parent batch!