January 2004
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
11h 1m
English
The UNIX operating environment presents a special challenge when it comes to starting a new process. The only way for a new process to be created is for an existing process to ask the system to make a copy, a complete “clone” of the process environment (see Figure 9-1). A parent process is said to fork a “child” process: this is the computer equivalent of cellular mitosis in living organisms.

Once the fork is completed, there are two essentially identical process environments under kernel control. They have the same process logical memory view, identical file descriptors (to facilitate ...
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