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From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
To: George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] "Fork considered harmful"
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2019 12:38:29 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1904111226370.13313@grey.csi.cam.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKr6gn3-qgbsDaqvr5n-Ojaa9CS2Y+PnSD2AjNbu+9-bCX1TMA@mail.gmail.com>

George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
> On Apr 10, 2019, at 4:06 PM, Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Any view on this? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-fork-in-the-road/
>
> fork() and the various exec() flavours had this single compelling
> story for me: the stdin/stdout/stderr *and all other open I/O* was
> inherited across the process boundary. This alone made writing code
> significantly easier.

Mark Wooding had an insightful observation in response to that paper: it's
relatively common in Unix to have oblivious intermediaries where it is
important that they pass on things like file descriptors and signal
dispositions. How would you implement nohup() in a spawn-based system?

[ Yorkbox-related tangent: the other day I was trying to find out more
about the JANET NRS (the hosts.txt-alike with names in uk.ac.cam format)
and all I could find out is that it was hosted at Salford on Pr1me
computers https://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf ... the reason
for looking because I'm no longer providing secondary DNS for Salford. ]

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot@dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/
Fair Isle: East 2 or 3, veering south 5 or 6. Slight, becoming moderate.
Occasional rain or drizzle. Moderate or good.

  reply	other threads:[~2019-04-11 11:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-04-10 23:06 Richard Salz
2019-04-10 23:24 ` Bakul Shah
2019-04-10 23:37   ` George Michaelson
2019-04-11 11:38     ` Tony Finch [this message]
2019-04-11 23:37 ` Chris Hanson
2019-04-12  0:12   ` Derek Fawcus
2019-04-12 16:11 ` Jim Capp
2019-04-12 14:51 Noel Chiappa
2019-04-12 15:33 ` Warner Losh
2019-04-12 19:55 ` Dan Cross

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