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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 ...
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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 ...
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.
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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 ...
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 calling convention of a given program's language may differ from the calling convention of the underlying platform, OS, or of some library being linked to. For example, on 32-bit Windows, operating system calls have the stdcall calling convention, whereas many C programs that run there use the cdecl calling convention. To accommodate these ...