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In Unix-like operating systems, new processes are created by the fork() system call. The PID is returned to the parent process, enabling it to refer to the child in further function calls. The parent may, for example, wait for the child to terminate with the waitpid() function, or terminate the process with kill().
The term was coined by the programmers at MIT's Project MAC.According to Fernando J. Corbató, who worked on Project MAC around 1963, his team was the first to use the term daemon, inspired by Maxwell's demon, an imaginary agent in physics and thermodynamics that helped to sort molecules, stating, "We fancifully began to use the word daemon to describe background processes that worked ...
In most computer file systems, every directory has an entry (usually named ".") which points to the directory itself.In most DOS and UNIX command shells, as well as in the Microsoft Windows command line interpreters cmd.exe and Windows PowerShell, the working directory can be changed by using the CD or CHDIR commands.
POSIX defines the following options: [1]-c Treat the file as a mount point.-f Only report processes accessing the named files.-u Append user names in parentheses to each PID. ...
In UNIX computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of computational work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. It conventionally appears in the form of three numbers which represent the system load during the last one-, five-, and fifteen-minute periods.
In the decade preceding Unix, computers had grown enormously in power – to the point where computer operators were looking for new ways to get people to use their spare time on their machines. One of the major developments during this era was time-sharing , whereby a number of users would get small slices of computer time, at a rate at which ...
While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may be associated with the same program; for example, opening up several instances of the same program often results in more than ...
The definition of "open system" can be said to have become more formalized in the 1990s with the emergence of independently administered software standards such as The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification. Although computer users today are used to a high degree of both hardware and software interoperability, in the 20th century the open ...