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From: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Terminology question: What do we call a process before/after an exec()?
Message-ID: <113@tove.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1-Feb-85 23:39:51 EST
Article-I.D.: tove.113
Posted: Fri Feb  1 23:39:51 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Feb-85 05:25:02 EST
References: <2068@pegasus.UUCP>
Reply-To: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser)
Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD
Lines: 37

In article <2068@pegasus.UUCP> avi@pegasus.UUCP (Avi E. Gross) writes:
>I am not aware of any terminology (of an anthromorphic nature) to describe
>the state of a process immediately before an exec() or after. 
>Can anyone suggest a reasonable (and hopefully humurous :-) set of names that
>can be used to talk about these processes? What does one call the result of
>several exec's in a row? Does it matter which flavor of exec (execl, execv,
>execle, execve, execlp, execvp) was used? Can such a process find out whether
>it was the result of an exec from another process, or whether it was the
>exec of the original shell (hopefully ksh)?

After fork but before exec, a process is a blastomere.  This is a biological
term that refers to the individual child cells of the dividing fertilized
egg, before the cells have begun any differentiation or specialization,
and especially before they have done any growth before division.  This
is a lot like pre-execed forked processes.  After execing 
there is not an exactly analogous biological term, so `embryo'
might work ok.

Alternatively, before execing processes are clones, and one can
speak of the parent clone and child clone and even grandparent clone.
After execing processes are independent people.  Only then do the
terms sibling and unqualified-parent come into play.

For example: "sendmail uses mostly clones, not often people.  A grandfather
process acts as a demon, spawning grandchildren and killing off
their parents so the grandchildren will be taken care of by the orphanage
(process 1).  The clones become people only when another mailer is
called, in which case the grandfather spawns a child directly and
does not kill the parent (itself) but instead watches to see how
things go."

Or: "The sendmail blastomeres are taking over the machine.  Good
thing they are not people or we could never tell who made them."
-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark@maryland	Phone: +1-301-454-7817
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