Process Creation Concepts (The GNU C Library)

### 27.2 Process Creation Concepts ¶

This section gives an overview of processes and of the steps involved in creating a process and making it run another program.

A new processes is created when one of the functions `posix_spawn`, `fork`, `_Fork`, `vfork`, or `pidfd_spawn` is called. (The `system` and `popen` also create new processes internally.) Due to the name of the `fork` function, the act of creating a new process is sometimes called forking a process. Each new process (the child process or subprocess) is allocated a process ID, distinct from the process ID of the parent process. See Process Identification.

After forking a child process, both the parent and child processes continue to execute normally. If you want your program to wait for a child process to finish executing before continuing, you must do this explicitly after the fork operation, by calling `wait` or `waitpid` (see Process Completion). These functions give you limited information about why the child terminated—for example, its exit status code.

A newly forked child process continues to execute the same program as its parent process, at the point where the `fork` or `_Fork` call returns. You can use the return value from `fork` or `_Fork` to tell whether the program is running in the parent process or the child.

Having several processes run the same program is only occasionally useful. But the child can execute another program using one of the `exec` functions; see Executing a File. The program that the process is executing is called its process image. Starting execution of a new program causes the process to forget all about its previous process image; when the new program exits, the process exits too, instead of returning to the previous process image.