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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 ...
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.
Standard names of such functions in C are execl, execle, execlp, execv, execve, and execvp (see below), but not "exec" itself. The Linux kernel has one corresponding system call named "execve", whereas all aforementioned functions are user-space wrappers around it.
Fork and its variants are typically the only way of doing so in Unix-like systems. For a process to start the execution of a different program, it first forks to create a copy of itself. Then, the copy, called the " child process ", calls the exec system call to overlay itself with the other program: it ceases execution of its former program in ...
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.
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]
Copy-on-write (COW), also called implicit sharing [1] or shadowing, [2] is a resource-management technique [3] used in programming to manage shared data efficiently. Instead of copying data right away when multiple programs use it, the same data is shared between programs until one tries to modify it.
Unlike extended attributes, a similar file system feature which is typically of fixed size, forks can be of variable size, possibly even larger than the file's primary data fork. The size of a file is the sum of the sizes of each fork. Popular file systems that can use forks include Apple's HFS+ and Microsoft's NTFS.