Forking Processes
Forked processes are the traditional way to structure parallel tasks, and they are a fundamental part of the Unix tool set. It’s a straightforward way to start an independent program, whether it is different from the calling program or not. Forking is based on the notion of copying programs: when a program calls the fork routine, the operating system makes a new copy of that program in memory and starts running that copy in parallel with the original. Some systems don’t really copy the original program (it’s an expensive operation), but the new copy works as if it were a literal copy.
After a fork operation, the original copy of the program is
called the parent process, and the copy created
by os.fork is called the child process. In
general, parents can make any number of children, and children can
create child processes of their own; all forked processes run
independently and in parallel under the operating system’s control. It
is probably simpler in practice than in theory, though. The Python
script in Example 5-1 forks
new child processes until you type the letter q
at the console.
Example 5-1. PP3E\System\Processes\fork1.py
# forks child processes until you type 'q'
import os
def child( ):
print 'Hello from child', os.getpid( )
os._exit(0) # else goes back to parent loop
def parent( ):
while 1:
newpid = os.fork( )
if newpid == 0:
child( )
else:
print 'Hello from parent', os.getpid( ), newpid
if raw_input( ) == 'q': break
parent( )Python’s process forking tools, ...