Respected Sir,

I need some information on fork() and advantages of having more children.

Please help me with this.

Thanks.

fork() is a very useful way of parallel programming by using the operating system to do the hard work for you.
fork() copies your current process and gives the new process a different process id. The new process is a child of the original program.
The only difference is the return value of the fork() function call. The result indicates whether the current process is the parent or child.
BE CAREFUL , the processes are identical, all variables are shared and therefore if you want to change a variable without conflict you will need to use semaphores.
I have mainly used fork() to run off-line calculations (that require no user interaction) whilst allowing the parent process to monitor user input to start other parallel calculations or cancel processes if required.

Dear LinuxInfo,

As bscarrier mentioned it is so useful and .... fork() makes a child which is alive until its parent is alive and it is so useful for multiprocessing which makes Linux so powerful, in windows we have Spawn which allows to run two separate processes simultaneously(for example we run ls and main simultaneously) but in Linux we dont have such a thing we have to build it by a fork and an exec, moreover in this trend we have to pay attention to prevent making zombies(which is not good for us) moreover It is useful to know by one fork() we have 2 processes simultaneously, by two fork()s we have 4 processes simultaneously, and ... so we have this trend: processes = 2 ^ (Number of Fork()s).

Spawn
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ls main
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fork()
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ls ls
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Regards,
Eilya

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