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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 ...
The DOS/Windows spawn functions are inspired by Unix functions fork and exec; however, as these operating systems do not support fork, [2] the spawn function was supplied as a replacement for the fork-exec combination. However, the spawn function, although it deals adequately with the most common use cases, lacks the full power of fork-exec ...
One of the earliest references to a fork concept appeared in A Multiprocessor System Design by Melvin Conway, published in 1962. [1] Conway's paper motivated the implementation by L. Peter Deutsch of fork in the GENIE time-sharing system, where the concept was borrowed by Ken Thompson for its earliest appearance [2] in Research Unix.
Linux 2.6 kernels adhere to this behavior, and FreeBSD supports both of these methods since version 5.0. [5] However, because of historical differences between System V and BSD behaviors with regard to ignoring SIGCHLD, calling wait remains the most portable paradigm for cleaning up after forked child processes.
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 section does have a point when it describes the combination of forks and pipes, which is quite simple in Unix but then again, (1) fork is older than pipe (V1 vs. V3 Research Unix, IIRC) and (2) the pipelining mechanism could have been implemented in a different way, e.g. by a combined fork/exec system call that can also set file descriptors.
HFS, and the original Apple Macintosh file system MFS, allowed a file system object to have two kinds of forks: a data fork and a resource fork. The resource fork was designed to store non-compiled data that would be used by the system's graphical user interface (GUI), such as localizable text strings, a file's icon to be used by the Finder or ...
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