Skip to main content
Unix & Linux

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

3
  • 3
    I understand how forks work, and how to use them. But why would I want to create a new process, when I can do the same thing but with less effort? For example, my teacher gave me an assignment where I had to create a process for each number passed to argv, to check if the number is a prime. But isn't that just a detour of ultimately doing the same thing? I could've just used an array and used a function for each number... So why do we create child processes, instead of doing all the processing in the main process? Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 1:41
  • 4
    I would venture to say that you understand how forks work, and how to use them, because you once had a teacher who gave you an assignment where you had to create a bunch of processes (with the number being specified at run-time), control them, co-ordinate them, and communicate among them. Of course nobody would do something trivial like that in real life. But, if you have a large problem that is easily decomposed into pieces that can be handled in parallel (e.g., edge detection in an image), forking lets you use multiple CPU cores simultaneously. Commented Aug 11, 2017 at 18:05
  • You can use threads to run code on multiple CPU cores, you don't need a whole process for that. The advantage of using a separate process lies more in gaining more protection. E.g. if you were doing something more complex than check if a number is prime, and it crashed, it wouldn't take down your entire parent process, you would just lose the one result. Also, you can reduce a process's privileges. E.g. if the parent runs as root, you can run the child process as the currently-logged-in user, so if there's an exploit in the child process code, it can't access other users' files. Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 13:45