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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Fork and Join, Pipe in C
Message-ID: <22255@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 28-Jun-87 01:23:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.22255
Posted: Sun Jun 28 01:23:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jun-87 09:40:15 EDT
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> Sorry, Guy, but you are wrong.  I suggest you do a little more background
> reading.

Sorry, Larry, but you are, as usual, wrong.  I suggest you look in
the source directory for "make" and note that it also uses "vfork",
then check out "find", which also uses it (and, in the alpha version,
ABused it - that was fixed for the final version) and then look at
the source to the "popen" routine - it also uses "vfork".  It may
have been put in to speed up "csh", but concluding from this that it
was *not* indended to be used by anybody else is absurd.

> No Guy, not bullshit, true shit.  Vfork() was put in specifically for
> csh.  Any way that it is used in that program should be looked upon as
> a legitimate use of the system call.  Saying otherwise is ridiculous.

No, saying what you just said is ridiculous, considering that the use
of "vfork" in question is specifically recommended *against* by the
manual!  If they had intended that it be used in that fashion, they
wouldn't have told you not to use it in that fashion.

> Yeah - and just when is that work scheduled for completion?  Real soon
> now, eh?  This business about Unix documentation is a joke.  Only trivial
> things are documented well.  Anything complicated is, as has been pointed
> out before, addendumed by a lengthy bugs section or is just quiet.

This is true, but accepting it as "the way of the world" and doing
nothing to fix it is asinine.  Various vendors have done some good
work on fixing the UNIX documentation.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.ltin