Forking vs Threading

Question

I have used threading before in my applications and know its concepts well, but recently in my operating system lecture I came across fork(). Which is something similar to t

Answer 1

fork() spawns a new copy of the process, as you've noted. What isn't mentioned above is the exec() call which often follows. This replaces the existing process with a new process (a new executable) and as such, fork()/exec() is the standard means of spawning a new process from an old one.

e.g. that's how your shell will invoke a process from the command line. You specify your process (ls, say) and the shell forks and then execs ls.

Note that this operates at a very different level from threading. Threading runs multiple lines of execution intra-process. Forking is a means of creating new processes.