From owner-freebsd-current Sun Apr 21 18:17:35 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id SAA28238 for current-outgoing; Sun, 21 Apr 1996 18:17:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id SAA28231 for ; Sun, 21 Apr 1996 18:17:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id SAA16344; Sun, 21 Apr 1996 18:12:21 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199604220112.SAA16344@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Changes for vfork() To: smpatel@umiacs.umd.edu (Sujal Patel) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 18:12:21 -0700 (MST) Cc: peter@jhome.DIALix.COM, current@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Sujal Patel" at Apr 21, 96 02:19:20 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Note that there are some programs still using these features.. tcsh, > > for one, uses the shared address space semantics to update some statistics > > in the parent. > > This is an absolutely horrible thing for a user program to do. The > vfork() call was never intended to allow you to update the parent's > address space and as the man page states, should never be used in such a > way. Besides, FreeBSD doesn't have an implementation that supports this > anyway :) If tcsh (I think it's actually csh) *really* wants to update > some of the parents address space on FreeBSD, it should use rfork() > instead IMO. The inevitble response to "you aren't supposed to use that interface to do that thing" is "how then am I supposed to do that thing", where "you are not supposed to" is not an acceptable answer. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.