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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 ...
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 favor of the other. The fork operation creates a separate address space for the ...
The child process can then overlay itself with a different program (using exec) as required. [ 1 ] Each process may create many child processes but will have at most one parent process; if a process does not have a parent this usually indicates that it was created directly by the kernel .
David A. Wheeler notes [9] four possible outcomes of a fork, with examples: The death of the fork. This is by far the most common case. It is easy to declare a fork, but considerable effort to continue independent development and support. A re-merging of the fork (e.g., egcs becoming "blessed" as the new version of GNU Compiler Collection.)
The traditional Unix system does not have the functionality to create a new process running a new executable program in one step, which explains the importance of exec for Unix programming. Other systems may use spawn as the main tool for running executables. Its result is equivalent to the fork–exec sequence of Unix-like
In a POSIX-oriented operating system, program instance refers to an executing process. It is instantiated for a program via system calls such as fork() and exec() . Each executing process is an instance of a program which it has been instantiated from.
A high-level overview of the Linux kernel's system call interface, which handles communication between its various components and the userspace. In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system [a] on which it is executed.
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.