Re: vfork revisited (was 64bit clean XEmacs)

When a UNIX process wants to create a child, it fork()s and exec()s. The fork() duplicates the parent's address space. This was seen as silly when 9 times out of 10 the child simply calls exec and thus was born vfork(). vfork() has this problem, though that the child briefly runs in the parents address space. The implications of this statement are serious and have resulted in two things. First, standards authors have had no choice but to say that you can't guarantee anything aside from exec() or _exit() will work.