Talk:Child process

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This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

child process A new process created by an existing process. The new process is there after known to the preexisting process as its child process. The preexisting process is called the parent process.

f.t.a

Does this concept apply there? How can you find child processes in Windows? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.184.58.60 (talk) 15:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

This is a prctl used by Upstart and systemd when they are run as session/user init systems (not PID 1) to make sure orphans go to the session init system, not the system init system (PID 1). It is only available on Linux, however it would be nice to have this info on this wiki. See this thread for more info on it: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1412040. CameronNemo (talk) 18:43, 16 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

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The current form in Unix draws on Multics (section History) is not true in any meaningful way. Their methods of process creation and execution were completely different.

Multics had a single process per user login session or background daemon; creating a new process was an expensive operation and was only performed by the Initializer process on login or daemon startup. No user process could create a subprocess (apart from the new_proc command which replaced the existing process); execution of multiple programs was managed by the stack-based environment.

The fundamental concept of a child process in Unix is that any existing process can create a process by duplicating itself, using the fork() system call. The child process may then execute a different program if required. Any user process can do this, and frequently will - in particular the shell, as commands are executed. This is the means by which multiple programs run in Unix.

Threefoursixninefour (talk) 13:20, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply