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fork (system call) In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C standard library wrapper to ...
fork() is the name of the system call that the parent process uses to "divide" itself ("fork") into two identical processes. After calling fork(), the created child process is an exact copy of the parent except for the return value of the fork () call. This includes open files, register state, and all memory allocations, which includes the ...
The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century. [2] In the software environment, the word evokes the fork system call, which causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to perform different tasks.
The actual system call does transfer control to the kernel (and is more implementation-dependent and platform-dependent than the library call abstracting it). For example, in Unix-like systems, fork and execve are C library functions that in turn execute instructions that invoke the fork and exec system calls.
Copy-on-write. Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing[1] or shadowing, [2] is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources [3] (most commonly memory pages, storage sectors, files, and data structures).
Implementations of the fork–join model will typically fork tasks, fibers or lightweight threads, not operating-system-level "heavyweight" threads or processes, and use a thread pool to execute these tasks: the fork primitive allows the programmer to specify potential parallelism, which the implementation then maps onto actual parallel execution. [1]
A child process in computing is a process created by another process (the parent process). This technique pertains to multitasking operating systems, and is sometimes called a subprocess or traditionally a subtask. There are two major procedures for creating a child process: the fork system call (preferred in Unix-like systems and the POSIX ...
Process identifier. In computing, the process identifier (a.k.a. process ID or PID) is a number used by most operating system kernels —such as those of Unix, macOS and Windows —to uniquely identify an active process. This number may be used as a parameter in various function calls, allowing processes to be manipulated, such as adjusting the ...