qfork() (The Spawn of spawn())

[Lenox H. Brassell]

Submitted-by: lenox at media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Lenox H. Brassell)

In article <16478 at cs.utexas.edu>, guido at cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) writes:
> (Note that the
> spawn() functions found in Microsoft C for MS-DOS emulate either just
> exec() or fork()+exec()+wait(), which is much less powerful, but
> all that MS-DOS can support (last time I looked).)
> 

Using Microsoft C under OS/2, you can pass P_NOWAIT as the first
argument to the MSC spawn() functions, and the child process will run
asynchronously.  The spawn() functions return the child process's PID
in this case.

Although MSC is certainly not a UNIX compiler, this "prior art" might
be a good place to start if POSIX needs a "safe" qfork()+exec() service.


--lenox (lenox at media-lab.mit.edu)

Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 59