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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.
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 ...
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.
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 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.
Unlike extended attributes, a similar file system feature which is typically of fixed size, forks can be of variable size, possibly even larger than the file's primary data fork. The size of a file is the sum of the sizes of each fork. Popular file systems that can use forks include Apple's HFS+ and Microsoft's NTFS.
Copy-on-write (COW), also called implicit sharing [1] or shadowing, [2] is a resource-management technique [3] used in programming to manage shared data efficiently. Instead of copying data right away when multiple programs use it, the same data is shared between programs until one tries to modify it.
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 ...