- Fork-exec
Fork-exec is a commonly used technique in
Unix whereby an executing process spawns a new program. fork() is the name of thesystem call that theparent process uses to "divide" itself ("fork") into two identical processes. After calling fork(), the createdchild process is actually an exact copy of the parent - which would probably be of limited use - so it replaces itself with another process using the system call exec().When a process forks, a complete copy of the executing program is made into the new process. This new process (which is a child of the parent) has a new
process identifier (PID). The fork() function returns the child's PID to the parent, while it returns 0 to the child, in order to allow the two identical processes to distinguish from each other.The parent process can either continue execution or wait for the child process to complete. The child, after discovering that it is the child, replaces itself completely with another program, so that the code and
address space of the original program are lost.If the parent chooses to wait for the child to die, then the parent will receive the exit code of the program that the child executed. Otherwise, the parent can ignore the child process and continue executing as it normally would; to prevent the child becoming a zombie it should wait on children at intervals or on
SIGCHLD .When the child process calls exec(), all data in the original program is lost, and replaced with a running copy of the new program. This is known as overlaying. Although all data is replaced, the
file descriptor s that were open in the parent are closed only if the program has explicitly marked them "close-on-exec". This allows for the common practice of the parent creating a pipe prior to calling fork() and using it to communicate with the executed program.References
* [http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~franco/OpSys-304-427/messages/node91.html File descriptors across fork(2)/exec(2) paper in Mcgill University]
* [http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/unix/fork.html fork page in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University]
*"Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", W.Richard Stevens, Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-56317-7
*"Unix Power Tools", J Peek, T O'Reilly, M Loukides, O'Reilly, ISBN 1-56592-260-3
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