qfork() (The Spawn of spawn())

[Loren L. Hart]

Submitted-by: loren at Eng.Sun.COM (Loren L. Hart)

In article <16478 at cs.utexas.edu> guido at cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) writes:
>Submitted-by: guido at cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
>
>peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>>Yes, fork() is a cleaner method of creating new processes. Yes, it takes
>>a fairly complex calling sequence to get spawn() to have anything like
>>the functionality of fork()...exec(). But I think it'd be worthwhile to
>>let a little heresy in in exchange for making POSIX more palatable to
>>folks in poorer environments.
>
>I know of precedents even in OS'es that support fork(): Amoeba and
>Topaz support a variant of what you call spawn().  (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).)

The Ada POSIX Draft currently has some sort of spawn command, since
fork is not necessicarily safe with respect to Ada Tasks.  I don't rember
the specific routine, but it is likely to go through some change before
the Ada version of the standard is finalized.  I would hope that this 
spawn capability will be merged back into the 1003.1 standard at some
point in the future.

------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Loren L. Hart
The Ada Ace Group, Inc.
PO Box 36195
San Jose, CA  95158
loren at cup.portal.com

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Loren L. Hart			The Ada Ace Group, Inc
loren at cup.portal.com		P.O. Box 36195
				San Jose, CA  95158


Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 62