From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 25 13:15:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from web20106.mail.yahoo.com (web20106.mail.yahoo.com [216.136.226.43]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id A2A9737B417 for ; Thu, 25 Apr 2002 13:15:53 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <20020425201553.43809.qmail@web20106.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [208.179.166.30] by web20106.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 25 Apr 2002 13:15:53 PDT Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 13:15:53 -0700 (PDT) From: Bsd Neophyte Subject: what are parent and child processes all about? To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <004b01c1ec11$775f54a0$32040101@hume> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I don't follow what these are... this is what my text says... "When a process is started, a duplicate of that process is created. This new process is called the child and the process that created it is called the parent. The child process then replaces the copy for the code the parent process created with the code the child process is supposted to execute." The last sentance confuses me the most. Actually the entire thing confsues me. Why is a child process started anyways? Why does the parent process spawn a child process in the first place? And what's all this code copy stuff all about? The next paragraph states... "While the command is executing, the shell waits until the child process has completed. After is completes, the parent process terminates the child process, and a prompt is displated, ready for a new command" Why does this happen? I guess it goes back to my confusion about why the child process is created in the first place. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message