The Linux Programming Interface

24PROCESS CREATION

In this and the next four chapters, we look at how a process is created and terminates, and how a process can execute a new program. This chapter covers process creation. However, before diving into that subject, we present a short overview of the main system calls covered in these chapters.

24.1 Overview of fork(), exit(), wait(), and execve()

The principal topics of this and the next few chapters are the system calls fork(), exit(), wait(), and execve(). Each of these system calls has variants, which we’ll also look at. For now, we provide an overview of these four system calls and how they are typically used together.

• The fork() system call allows one process, the parent, to create a new process, the child. This is done ...