Creating a Process in C
17 July 2007I won't list reasons why every programmer should know C because there have already been numerous discussions on the subject.
As a programmer, you can decide for yourself whether learning C will benefit your career.
I've chosen to start writing a small project in C so I can get a better knowledge of pointers, structs and memory allocation.
I'm going to share a small snippet of code which creates a process in Unix. You might find this interesting if you've never seen C code before.
Processes are created using the fork() function, which basically makes a copy of the existing process running and assigns a new process id (PID) to the child process. The rest of the code is fairly self explanatory.
#include <stdio.h>
/* the main() function is automatically executed... */
int main()
{
/* fork the process */
int p_id = fork();
/* this is the code the child process will execute */
if(p_id == 0)
{
/* endless loop */
for(;;)
{
printf("Im a child processn");
sleep(10);
}
}
/* close the parent process */
exit(0);
}
Save and compile the code using gcc (gcc process.c -o process). The process should now be listed in the process list (type ps -aux in unix).
