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Manual page for FORK(2)

fork, vfork - create a new process

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>

pid_t fork(void);

DESCRIPTION

The fork function causes creation of a new process (vfork is another name for fork). The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process except for the following:

The child process has a unique process ID.

The child process has a different parent process ID (i.e., the process ID of the parent process).

The child process has its own copy of the parent's descriptors. These descriptors reference the same underlying objects, so that, for instance, file pointers in file objects are shared between the child and the parent, so that an lseek(2) on a descriptor in the child process can affect a subsequent read(2) or write(2) by the parent. This descriptor copying is also used by the shell to establish standard input and output for newly created processes as well as to set up pipes.

The child processes resource utilizations are set to 0; see setrlimit.2

For POSIX applications the following differences between the child and parent process also apply:

File locks previously set by the parent are not inherited by the child.

Pending alarms are cleared for the child process.

The set of pending signals for the child process is initialized to the empty set.

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion, fork returns a value of 0 to the child process and returns the process ID of the child process to the parent process. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned to the parent process, no child process is created, and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

The fork function will fail and no child process will be created if one or more of the following are true:

[EAGAIN]: The system-imposed limit on the total number of processes under execution would be exceeded.
[EAGAIN]: The system-imposed limit MAXUPRC (<sys/param.h>) on the total number of processes under execution by a single user would be exceeded.
[ENOMEM]: There is insufficient swap space for the new process.

fork, vfork - create a new process

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

RETURN VALUE

ERRORS

SEE ALSO