Fork (system call) - Wikipedia
Fork (system call)
In computing, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is usually implemented as a C standard library wrapper to the fork, clone, or other system calls of the kernel. For many years, fork was the primary method of process creation on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and it remains a required interface for compliance with POSIX. Despite this, it has fallen out of favor in recent years as a result of flaws including poor performance, a lack of thread safety, and its status as a common source of security vulnerabilities.1
Printed 2026-10-13.
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Footnotes
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Baumann, Andrew; Appavoo, Jonathan; Krieger, Orran; Roscoe, Timothy (May 13–15, 2019). A fork() in the road. Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS ‘19). Bertinoro, Italy: ACM. doi:10.1145/3317550.3321435. ↩