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Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designsGhosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designsPosted Nov 17, 2010 12:42 UTC (Wed) by brinkmd (subscriber, #45122)In reply to: Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs by bronson Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs
But fork() is very much a conflated system call, so is exec(). Fork duplicates the address space, and the descriptor table, and a bunch of other stuff. exec() loads a binary image into an address space and creates a thread and makes that thread runnable in the address space.
That fork() is conflated is even visible within the limited world view of Linux, see clone().
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Ghosts of Unix past, part 2: Conflated designs Posted Nov 17, 2010 12:52 UTC (Wed) by brinkmd (subscriber, #45122) [Link]
Sorry, of course exec does not create a thread, that would be spawn(), another conflated call. By the way, fork/exec is an example of bad design, see the interaction of fork with pthreads, or the problems of open file descriptors being inherited unwillingly (FD_CLOEXEC). People who write portable software learn to forget about fork and exec very quickly.
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