forsyth@uunet.uu.net (03/11/89)
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 ]]