Is System V.4 fork reliable?

Lady Lodge Systems lls at kings.co.uk
Sat Jul 14 01:50:43 AEST 1990


In article <561 at oglvee.UUCP> jr at oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) writes:
>Somewhere along in the development of System V, fork became an unreliable
>system call....
>...
>The number of utilities that both use fork and also understand that under
>some circumstances it ought to be *retried* if it fails is pitifully small.
>(The shell simply reports the bogus message "No more processes"...

Or if you are using the command substitute construct (...`run cmd`...)
and the Bourne shell cannot fork it simply hangs.  No retry, No Error
just a full stop!  Sheesh!  if the shell is broken about retrying forks,
is it any wonder that most other programs are as well?

>My question is:  Is this *FIXED* in V.4?

Damned Good Question!
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