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Clone (Linux System Call)
In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C Standard Library (libc) wrapper to the fork, clone, or other system calls of the kernel. Fork is the primary method of process creation on Unix-like operating systems. Overview In multitasking operating systems, processes (running programs) need a way to create new processes, e.g. to run other programs. Fork and its variants are typically the only way of doing so in Unix-like systems. For a process to start the execution of a different program, it first forks to create a copy of itself. Then, the copy, called the "child process", calls the exec system call to overlay itself with the other program: it ceases execution of its former program in favor of the other. The fork operation cre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology and software engineering. The term "computing" is also synonymous with counting and calculating. In earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. History The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper (or for chalk and slate) with or without the aid of tables. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, though mathematical conc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Structure
In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data, i.e., it is an algebraic structure about data. Usage Data structures serve as the basis for abstract data types (ADT). The ADT defines the logical form of the data type. The data structure implements the physical form of the data type. Different types of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks. For example, relational databases commonly use B-tree indexes for data retrieval, while compiler implementations usually use hash tables to look up identifiers. Data structures provide a means to manage large amounts of data efficiently for uses such as large databases and internet indexing services. Usually, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spawn (computing)
Spawn in computing refers to a function that loads and executes a new child process. The current process may wait for the child to terminate or may continue to execute concurrent computing. Creating a new subprocess requires enough memory in which both the child process and the current program can execute. There is a family of spawn functions in DOS, inherited by Microsoft Windows. There is also a different family of spawn functions in an optional extension of the POSIX standards . DOS/Windows spawn functions The DOS/Windows spawn functions are inspired by Unix functions fork and exec; however, as these operating systems do not support fork,for Windows NT at least in the Win32 API; POSIX emulation environments such as Cygwin, or SFU do the spawn function was supplied as a replacement for the fork-exec combination. However, the spawn function, although it deals adequately with the most common use cases, lacks the full power of fork-exec, since after fork any process settings whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berkeley Software Distribution
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD. BSD was initially called Berkeley Unix because it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. Although these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in the 1990s by UNIX SVR4 and OSF/1, later releases provided the basis for several open-source operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin, and TrueOS ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calling Convention
In computer science, a calling convention is an implementation-level (low-level) scheme for how subroutines or functions receive parameters from their caller and how they return a result. When some code calls a function, design choices have been taken for where and how parameters are passed to that function, and where and how results are returned from that function, with these transfers typically done via certain registers or within certain structures within the call stack. There are design choices for how the tasks of preparing for a function call and restoring the environment after the function call are divided between the caller and the callee. Some calling convention specifies the way every function should get called. Introduction Calling conventions are usually considered part of the Application Binary Interface ''ABI''. Calling conventions may be related to a particular programming language's evaluation strategy, but most often are not considered part of it (or vic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pipe (computer Science)
In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements ( processes, threads, coroutines, functions, ''etc.''), arranged so that the output of each element is the input of the next; the name is by analogy to a physical pipeline. Usually some amount of buffering is provided between consecutive elements. The information that flows in these pipelines is often a stream of records, bytes, or bits, and the elements of a pipeline may be called filters; this is also called the pipes and filters design pattern. Connecting elements into a pipeline is analogous to function composition. Narrowly speaking, a pipeline is linear and one-directional, though sometimes the term is applied to more general flows. For example, a primarily one-directional pipeline may have some communication in the other direction, known as a ''return channel'' or ''backchannel,'' as in the lexer hack, or a pipeline may be fully bi-directional. Flows with one-directional tree and directed acyc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
File Descriptor
In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor (FD, less frequently fildes) is a process-unique identifier (handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket. File descriptors typically have non-negative integer values, with negative values being reserved to indicate "no value" or error conditions. File descriptors are a part of the POSIX API. Each Unix process (except perhaps daemons) should have three standard POSIX file descriptors, corresponding to the three standard streams: Overview In the traditional implementation of Unix, file descriptors index into a per-process maintained by the kernel, that in turn indexes into a system-wide table of files opened by all processes, called the . This table records the ''mode'' with which the file (or other resource) has been opened: for reading, writing, appending, and possibly other modes. It also indexes into a third table called the inode table that describes the actual u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He is most well-known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr. Personal life and career Dennis Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of ''The Design of Switching Circuits'' on switching circuit theory. As a child, Dennis moved with his family to Summit, New Jersey, where he graduated from Summit High School. He graduated from Harvard Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by multinational company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several laboratories in the United States and around the world. Researchers working at Bell Laboratories are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs had its origin in the complex corporate organization of the Bell System telephone conglomerate. In the late 19th century, the laboratory began as the Western Electric Engineering Department, l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Research Unix
The term "Research Unix" refers to early versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC). History The term ''Research Unix'' first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal (Vol. 57, No. 6, Pt. 2 Jul/Aug 1978) to distinguish it from other versions internal to Bell Labs (such as PWB/UNIX and MERT) whose code-base had diverged from the primary CSRC version. However, that term was little-used until Version 8 Unix, but has been retroactively applied to earlier versions as well. Prior to V8, the operating system was most commonly called simply UNIX (in caps) or the UNIX Time-Sharing System. AT&T licensed Version 5 to educational institutions, and Version 6 also to commercial sites. Schools paid $200 and others $20,000, discouraging most commercial use, but Version 6 was the most widely used version into the 1980s. Research Unix versions are often referr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie. Early life and education Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. When asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Genie
Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early time-sharing system including the Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. History Project Genie was funded by J. C. R. Licklider, the head of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office at that time. The project was a smaller counterpart to MIT's Project MAC. The Scientific Data Systems SDS 940 was created by modifying an SDS 930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. The work was funded by ARPA and directed by Melvin W. Pirtle and Wayne Lichtenberger at UC Berkeley. Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and L. Peter Deutsch were among the young technical leaders of that project. When completed and in service, the first 940 ran reliably in spite of its array of tricky mechanical issues such as a huge disk drive driven by hydraulic arms. It served about forty or fifty users at a time and still ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
