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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.
Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the computer's machine language). However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest.
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 ...
Also simply application or app. Computer software designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities for the benefit of the user. Common examples of applications include word processors, spreadsheets, accounting applications, web browsers, media players, aeronautical flight simulators, console games, and photo editors. This contrasts with system software, which is ...
The three high-school pathways are computer science, engineering, and biomedical science. Within each high school pathway are four or more courses designed to be taken in a certain order - an introductory course, two or more middle-level courses that can be taken in any order, and then a capstone course for the final high-school year. [2]
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages , where the document represents source code , and to markup languages , where the document represents data.
The concept behind a fork bomb — the processes continually replicate themselves, potentially causing a denial of service. In computing, a fork bomb (also called rabbit virus) is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
In computer science, the dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them. It was originally formulated in 1965 by Edsger Dijkstra as a student exam exercise, presented in terms of computers competing for access to tape drive ...