DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

FORK(3am)                  GNU Awk Extension Modules                 FORK(3am)

NAME
       fork, wait, waitpid - basic process management

SYNOPSIS
       @load "fork"

       pid = fork()

       ret = waitpid(pid)

       ret = wait();

DESCRIPTION
       The fork extension adds three functions, as follows.

       fork() This function creates a new process. The return value is the
              zero in the child and the process-id number of the child in the
              parent, or -1 upon error. In the latter case, ERRNO indicates
              the problem.  In the child, PROCINFO["pid"] and PROCINFO["ppid"]
              are updated to reflect the correct values.

       waitpid()
              This function takes a numeric argument, which is the process-id
              to wait for. The return value is that of the waitpid(2) system
              call.

       wait() This function waits for the first child to die.  The return
              value is that of the wait(2) system call.

BUGS
       There is no corresponding exec() function.

       The interfaces could be enhanced to provide more facilities, including
       pulling out the various bits of the return status.

EXAMPLE
       @load "fork"
       ...
       if ((pid = fork()) == 0)
           print "hello from the child"
       else
           print "hello from the parent"

SEE ALSO
       GAWK: Effective AWK Programming, filefuncs(3am), fnmatch(3am),
       inplace(3am), ordchr(3am), readdir(3am), readfile(3am), revoutput(3am),
       rwarray(3am), time(3am).

       fork(2), wait(2), waitpid(2).

AUTHOR
       Arnold Robbins, arnold@skeeve.com.

COPYING PERMISSIONS
       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2018, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

       Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
       manual page provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
       are preserved on all copies.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
       manual page under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
       the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
       permission notice identical to this one.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this
       manual page into another language, under the above conditions for
       modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in
       a translation approved by the Foundation.

Free Software Foundation          Feb 02 2018                        FORK(3am)