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In Unix-like operating systems, every process except process 0 (the swapper) is created when another process executes the fork() system call. The process that invoked fork is the parent process and the newly created process is the child process. Every process (except process 0) has one parent process, but can have many child processes.
In a strictly technical sense, a Unix-like system process is a daemon when its parent process terminates and the daemon is assigned the init process (process number 1) as its parent process and has no controlling terminal. However, more generally, a daemon may be any background process, whether a child of the init process or not.
The other process, the parent, receives from fork the process identifier of the child, which is always a positive number. The parent process passes this identifier to the waitpid system call to suspend execution until the child has exited. When this has happened, the parent resumes execution and exits by means of the return statement.
In Unix and other POSIX-compatible systems, the parent process can retrieve the exit status of a child process using the wait() family of system calls defined in wait.h. [10] Of these, the waitid() [11] call retrieves the full exit status, but the older wait() and waitpid() [12] calls retrieve only the least significant 8 bits of the exit status.
Most Unix systems have historically used init as the system process to which orphans are reparented, but in modern DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, and Linux systems, an orphan process may be reparented to a "subreaper" process instead of init. [1] [2] A process can be orphaned unintentionally, such as when the parent process terminates or crashes.
When the shell fork s a new child process for a command pipeline, both the parent shell process and the child process immediately make the child process the leader of the process group for the command pipeline. This ensures that the child is the leader of the process group before either the parent or child relies on this being the case.
In all Unix and Unix-like systems, as well as on Windows, each process has its own separate set of environment variables.By default, when a process is created, it inherits a duplicate run-time environment of its parent process, except for explicit changes made by the parent when it creates the child.
When a process forks, a complete copy of the executing program is made into the new process. This new process is a child of the parent process, and has a new process identifier (PID). The fork() function returns the child's PID to the parent process. The fork() function returns 0 to the child process. This enables the two otherwise identical ...