Lesson 2 of 81960s–today7 min
Processes and threads
When Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson described Unix in Communications of the ACM in 1974, one of its most copied ideas took a few lines: a process creates another with fork, which returns twice, once in the parent and once in a near-identical child. The child can then replace its program with exec. Every command you type in a Linux shell still starts that way.
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Sources
- The UNIX Time-Sharing System (D. M. Ritchie, K. Thompson, CACM 17(7), 1974) — ACM
- fork(2): create a child process — Linux man-pages project
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, chapters on processes and the process API — R. and A. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin–Madison