Oh my ghods!
Solaris did not handle me missing a exit(1) very well. It ended up being a fork bomb. Normally, i'd expect a modern Operating system to restict the number of processes per uid to something reasonable. And this being a non-root user it should not have hurt. But it brought a dual cpu e250 to its knees, using 1gig of RAM and 1 gig of swap in under 2 minutes.
Oh well, that'll teach me.
