What is the purpose of fork()?

Question

fork() is how you create new processes in Unix. When you call fork, you're creating a copy of your own process that has its own address space. This allows multiple tasks to run independently of one another as though they each had the full memory of the machine to themselves.

Here are some example usages of fork:

1. Your shell uses fork to run the programs you invoke from the command line.
2. Web servers like apache use fork to create multiple server processes, each of which handles requests in its own address space. If one dies or leaks memory, others are unaffected, so it functions as a mechanism for fault tolerance.
3. Google Chrome uses fork to handle each page within a separate process. This will prevent client-side code on one page from bringing your whole browser down.
4. fork is used to spawn processes in some parallel programs (like those written using MPI). Note this is different from using threads, which don't have their own address space and exist within a process.
5. Scripting languages use fork indirectly to start child processes. For example, every time you use a command like subprocess.Popen in Python, you fork a child process and read its output. This enables programs to work together.

Typical usage of fork in a shell might look something like this:

int child_process_id = fork();
if (child_process_id) {
    // Fork returns a valid pid in the parent process.  Parent executes this.

    // wait for the child process to complete
    waitpid(child_process_id, ...);  // omitted extra args for brevity

    // child process finished!
} else {
    // Fork returns 0 in the child process.  Child executes this.

    // new argv array for the child process
    const char *argv[] = {"arg1", "arg2", "arg3", NULL};

    // now start executing some other program
    exec("/path/to/a/program", argv);
}

The shell spawns a child process using exec and waits for it to complete, then continues with its own execution. Note that you don't have to use fork this way. You can always spawn off lots of child processes, as a parallel program might do, and each might run a program concurrently. Basically, any time you're creating new processes in a Unix system, you're using fork(). For the Windows equivalent, take a look at CreateProcess.

If you want more examples and a longer explanation, Wikipedia has a decent summary. And here are some slides here on how processes, threads, and concurrency work in modern operating systems.

fork() is how Unix create new processes. At the point you called fork(), your process is cloned, and two different processes continue the execution from there. One of them, the child, will have fork() return 0. The other, the parent, will have fork() return the PID (process ID) of the child.

For example, if you type the following in a shell, the shell program will call fork(), and then execute the command you passed (telnetd, in this case) in the child, while the parent will display the prompt again, as well as a message indicating the PID of the background process.

$ telnetd &

As for the reason you create new processes, that's how your operating system can do many things at the same time. It's why you can run a program and, while it is running, switch to another window and do something else.

fork() is used to create child process. When a fork() function is called, a new process will be spawned and the fork() function call will return a different value for the child and the parent.

If the return value is 0, you know you're the child process and if the return value is a number (which happens to be the child process id), you know you're the parent. (and if it's a negative number, the fork was failed and no child process was created)

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/ForkExecProcesses.html

fork() is basically used to create a child process for the process in which you are calling this function. Whenever you call a fork(), it returns a zero for the child id.

pid=fork()
if pid==0
//this is the child process
else if pid!=0
//this is the parent process

by this you can provide different actions for the parent and the child and make use of multithreading feature.

fork() will create a new child process identical to the parent. So everything you run in the code after that will be run by both processes — very useful if you have for instance a server, and you want to handle multiple requests.

System call fork() is used to create processes. It takes no arguments and returns a process ID. The purpose of fork() is to create a new process, which becomes the child process of the caller. After a new child process is created, both processes will execute the next instruction following the fork() system call. Therefore, we have to distinguish the parent from the child. This can be done by testing the returned value of fork():

If fork() returns a negative value, the creation of a child process was unsuccessful. fork() returns a zero to the newly created child process. fork() returns a positive value, the process ID of the child process, to the parent. The returned process ID is of type pid_t defined in sys/types.h. Normally, the process ID is an integer. Moreover, a process can use function getpid() to retrieve the process ID assigned to this process. Therefore, after the system call to fork(), a simple test can tell which process is the child. Please note that Unix will make an exact copy of the parent's address space and give it to the child. Therefore, the parent and child processes have separate address spaces.

Let us understand it with an example to make the above points clear. This example does not distinguish parent and the child processes.

#include  <stdio.h>
#include  <string.h>
#include  <sys/types.h>

#define   MAX_COUNT  200
#define   BUF_SIZE   100

void  main(void)
{
     pid_t  pid;
     int    i;
     char   buf[BUF_SIZE];

     fork();
     pid = getpid();
     for (i = 1; i <= MAX_COUNT; i++) {
          sprintf(buf, "This line is from pid %d, value = %d\n", pid, i);
          write(1, buf, strlen(buf));
     } 
}

Suppose the above program executes up to the point of the call to fork().

If the call to fork() is executed successfully, Unix will make two identical copies of address spaces, one for the parent and the other for the child. Both processes will start their execution at the next statement following the fork() call. In this case, both processes will start their execution at the assignment

pid = .....;

Both processes start their execution right after the system call fork(). Since both processes have identical but separate address spaces, those variables initialized before the fork() call have the same values in both address spaces. Since every process has its own address space, any modifications will be independent of the others. In other words, if the parent changes the value of its variable, the modification will only affect the variable in the parent process's address space. Other address spaces created by fork() calls will not be affected even though they have identical variable names.

What is the reason of using write rather than printf? It is because printf() is "buffered," meaning printf() will group the output of a process together. While buffering the output for the parent process, the child may also use printf to print out some information, which will also be buffered. As a result, since the output will not be send to screen immediately, you may not get the right order of the expected result. Worse, the output from the two processes may be mixed in strange ways. To overcome this problem, you may consider to use the "unbuffered" write.

If you run this program, you might see the following on the screen:

................
This line is from pid 3456, value 13
This line is from pid 3456, value 14
     ................
This line is from pid 3456, value 20
This line is from pid 4617, value 100
This line is from pid 4617, value 101
     ................
This line is from pid 3456, value 21
This line is from pid 3456, value 22
     ................

Process ID 3456 may be the one assigned to the parent or the child. Due to the fact that these processes are run concurrently, their output lines are intermixed in a rather unpredictable way. Moreover, the order of these lines are determined by the CPU scheduler. Hence, if you run this program again, you may get a totally different result.