Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcupt1!hpisoa1!vandys
From: vandys@hpisoa1.HP.COM (Andrew Valencia)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport
Subject: Re: X windows on Microport 286 Unix
Message-ID: <11190006@hpisoa1.HP.COM>
Date: 28 Jul 88 15:06:45 GMT
References: <172@trevan.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 15

/ hpisoa1:comp.unix.microport / dkhusema@faui44.UUCP (Dirk Husemann (Inf4 - hiwi),0.058I4,7908,09131-302036) /  6:08 am  Jul 26, 1988 /
From article <172@trevan.UUCP>, by trevor@trevan.UUCP (trevor):
>> 
>> 1)	imake calls ftruncate and vfork. Could anyone tell me what these
>> 	functions do?
> 
>		vfork() is a BSD fork(), the major difference being that
>	the parent process is suspended (put to sleep) until the child pro-
>	cess does an exec() or writes to the former parents data space.

    To amplify: use fork(); it has the same semantics as vfork() for your
purposes.  ftruncate() is used to free space off the end of a file.  BSD
eventually wanted to improve on it with a general mechanism for freeing
ranges of space within a file.

				Andy Valencia