Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Family time – the exec family APIs

Now that we have understood the exec semantics, it's time we saw how to perform the exec operation programmatically. Unix and Linux provide several C APIs, seven in fact, that all ultimately do the same job: They have the predecessor process exec the successor.

So, there are seven APIs that all do the same thing? Mostly, yes; hence they are called the exec family of APIs.

Lets take a look at them:

#include <unistd.h>extern char **environ;int execl(const char *path, const char *arg, ...);int execlp(const char *file, const char *arg, ...);int execle(const char *path, const char *arg, ...,            char * const envp[]);int execv(const char *path, char *const argv[]);int execvp(const char *file, char *const argv[]); ...