Unix – fork() system call in c

cforkunix

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <unistd.h>
    int main()
    {
       fork();
       fork() && fork() || fork();
       fork();

     printf("forked\n");
     return 0;
    }

It cause difficulty to understand how to calculate number of processes spawned after executing the program?
Help me to find out.

Platform –UBUNTU 10.04

Best Answer

Let's follow the fork-tree, assuming none of the forks fails

fork();

Now we have two processes, so far it doesn't matter who's child and who parent, call them p1 and p2

fork()

Both of those processes spawn another child, so we have 4 processes, for two of them (p3, p4) the result is zero, for the other two (p1 and p2) it's nonzero

   && fork()

p1 and p2 fork again, giving p5 and p6, six processes total. In p1 and p2, the && evaluates to true, so they don't fork again in this line. For p3, p4, p5, p6, the && evaluates to false, so they fork

              || fork();

here, spawning four new processes, giving a total of 6 + 4 = 10.

fork();

each of the 10 processes forks again, makes 20.

Related Solutions

Unix – Differences between fork and exec

The use of fork and exec exemplifies the spirit of UNIX in that it provides a very simple way to start new processes.

The fork call basically makes a duplicate of the current process, identical in almost every way. Not everything is copied over (for example, resource limits in some implementations) but the idea is to create as close a copy as possible.

The new process (child) gets a different process ID (PID) and has the PID of the old process (parent) as its parent PID (PPID). Because the two processes are now running exactly the same code, they can tell which is which by the return code of fork - the child gets 0, the parent gets the PID of the child. This is all, of course, assuming the fork call works - if not, no child is created and the parent gets an error code.

The exec call is a way to basically replace the entire current process with a new program. It loads the program into the current process space and runs it from the entry point.

So, fork and exec are often used in sequence to get a new program running as a child of a current process. Shells typically do this whenever you try to run a program like find - the shell forks, then the child loads the find program into memory, setting up all command line arguments, standard I/O and so forth.

But they're not required to be used together. It's perfectly acceptable for a program to fork itself without execing if, for example, the program contains both parent and child code (you need to be careful what you do, each implementation may have restrictions). This was used quite a lot (and still is) for daemons which simply listen on a TCP port and fork a copy of themselves to process a specific request while the parent goes back to listening.

Similarly, programs that know they're finished and just want to run another program don't need to fork, exec and then wait for the child. They can just load the child directly into their process space.

Some UNIX implementations have an optimized fork which uses what they call copy-on-write. This is a trick to delay the copying of the process space in fork until the program attempts to change something in that space. This is useful for those programs using only fork and not exec in that they don't have to copy an entire process space.

If the exec is called following fork (and this is what happens mostly), that causes a write to the process space and it is then copied for the child process.

Note that there is a whole family of exec calls (execl, execle, execve and so on) but exec in context here means any of them.

The following diagram illustrates the typical fork/exec operation where the bash shell is used to list a directory with the ls command:

+--------+
| pid=7  |
| ppid=4 |
| bash   |
+--------+
    |
    | calls fork
    V
+--------+             +--------+
| pid=7  |    forks    | pid=22 |
| ppid=4 | ----------> | ppid=7 |
| bash   |             | bash   |
+--------+             +--------+
    |                      |
    | waits for pid 22     | calls exec to run ls
    |                      V
    |                  +--------+
    |                  | pid=22 |
    |                  | ppid=7 |
    |                  | ls     |
    V                  +--------+
+--------+                 |
| pid=7  |                 | exits
| ppid=4 | <---------------+
| bash   |
+--------+
    |
    | continues
    V

Visually what happens to fork() in a For Loop

Here's how to understand it, starting at the for loop.

Loop starts in parent, i == 0
Parent fork()s, creating child 1.
You now have two processes. Both print i=0.
Loop restarts in both processes, now i == 1.
Parent and child 1 fork(), creating children 2 and 3.
You now have four processes. All four print i=1.
Loop restarts in all four processes, now i == 2.
Parent and children 1 through 3 all fork(), creating children 4 through 7.
You now have eight processes. All eight print i=2.
Loop restarts in all eight processes, now i == 3.
Loop terminates in all eight processes, as i < 3 is no longer true.
All eight processes print hi.
All eight processes terminate.

So you get 0 printed two times, 1 printed four times, 2 printed 8 times, and hi printed 8 times.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Unix – Differences between fork and exec

Visually what happens to fork() in a For Loop

Related Topic