fork

fork

Spawns a child process that executes the code immediately following the fork call until the process is terminated (usually with an exit ). The child process runs parallel to the parent process and shares all the parent's variables and open filehandles. The function returns the child pid to the parent process and 0 to the child process on success. If it fails, it returns the undefined value to the parent process, and no child process is created. If you fork your child processes, you'll have to wait on their zombies when they die. See the wait function for more information. The fork function is unlikely to be implemented on any operating system not resembling Unix, unless it purports POSIX compliance.