who (mis)uses vfork?

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Article #11451

#11451

From: mcvax!minster.york.ac.uk!forsyth
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 1989 00:42

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I was surprised to discover that SunOS 4.0 implements vfork!=fork.  Also,
there is apparently some magic in <vfork.h> 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 <vfork.h>, it only contains a
"#pragma" to help out the compiler.  --wnl ]]

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!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: <swordfish.604807531@minster.york.ac.uk>
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
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