Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request From: mcvax!minster.york.ac.uk!forsyth@uunet.uu.net Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: who (mis)uses vfork? Keywords: SunOS Message-ID: Date: 11 Mar 89 00:42:17 GMT Sender: usenet@rice.edu Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 17 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu Original-Date: 2 Mar 1989 02:05:30 GMT X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 192, message 7 of 9 I was surprised to discover that SunOS 4.0 implements vfork!=fork. Also, there is apparently some magic in on Sun4s to make it work on those machines. According to a (Sun) USENIX paper ``Virtual Memory Architecture in SunOS'', there are programs that rely on a child process being able to store things in the parent's memory after the vfork; they malfunction if vfork==fork. Really! Does anyone have a list of these cretinous programs? For various reasons, I'd like to fix them. Answers to me by mail, please, if possible; I'll summarise later. ukc!minster!forsyth forsyth@minster.york.ac.uk [[ I know of one: /bin/csh. At least it used to do that to implement the builtin "hashstat" command. Good luck trying to fix it! It might be better to just ditch the command. As for , it only contains a "#pragma" to help out the compiler. --wnl ]]