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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.
When a process calls fork, it is deemed the parent process and the newly created process is its child. After the fork, both processes not only run the same program, but they resume execution as though both had called the system call. They can then inspect the call's return value to determine their status, child or parent, and act accordingly.
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.
CS—Computer Science; CSE—Computer science and engineering; CSI—Common System Interface; CSM—Compatibility support module; CSMA/CD—Carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection; CSP—Cloud service provider; CSP—Communicating sequential processes; CSRF—Cross-site request forgery; CSS—Cascading style sheets; CSS—Content ...
A single processor or uniprocessor system could disable interrupts by executing currently running code without preemption, which is very inefficient on multiprocessor systems. [7] " The key ability we require to implement synchronization in a multiprocessor is a set of hardware primitives with the ability to atomically read and modify a memory ...
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 ...
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 ...
A resource fork stores information in a specific form, containing details such as icon bitmaps, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and application code (machine code). For example, a word processing file might store its text in the data fork, while storing any embedded images in the same file's resource fork.