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program demonstrates the mechanics of the fork system call in the C programming language. The program forks into two processes, each deciding what functionality they perform based on the return value of the fork system call. Boilerplate code such as header inclusions has been omitted.
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 wait system call is commonly invoked in the SIGCHLD handler. POSIX.1-2001 allows a parent process to elect for the kernel to automatically reap child processes that terminate by explicitly setting the disposition of SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN (although ignore is the default, automatic reaping only occurs if the disposition is set to ignore ...
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.
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.
In the C and C++ programming languages, unistd.h is the name of the header file that provides access to the POSIX operating system API. [1] It is defined by the POSIX.1 standard, the base of the Single Unix Specification, and should therefore be available in any POSIX-compliant operating system and compiler.
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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 ...