The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces
@ 2021-08-02  2:42 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-08-02 14:58 ` Theodore Ts'o
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 20+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-08-02  2:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

> spawn() beats fork()[;] fork() should be deprecated

Spawn is a further complication of exec, which tells what signals and
file descriptors to inherit in addition to what arguments and
environment variables to pass.

Fork has a place. For example, Program 1 in
www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sieve/sieve.pdf forks like crazy and never
execs. To use spawn, the program would have to be split in three (or
be passed a switch setting).

While you may dismiss Program 1 as merely a neat demo, the same idea
applies in parallelizing code for use in a multiprocessor world.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 20+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-08-04 15:05 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-08-02  2:42 [TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces Douglas McIlroy
2021-08-02 14:58 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-08-02 18:15   ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-02 18:24     ` Warner Losh
2021-08-02 20:55     ` John Cowan
2021-08-02 21:06       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 21:25         ` Dan Cross
2021-08-02 21:59           ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-02 22:33             ` John Cowan
2021-08-03  0:20           ` [TUHS] fork (Re: " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03  0:59             ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03  1:20               ` Steve Nickolas
2021-08-03  0:21     ` [TUHS] " Bakul Shah
2021-08-03  1:49       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03  3:21         ` Adam Thornton
2021-08-03  3:27         ` Bakul Shah
2021-08-03  3:51           ` Jon Steinhart
2021-08-03  7:19   ` arnold
2021-08-03 23:12     ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-08-04 15:04       ` Paul Winalski

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).