[kindfellow92]

> The concept of Fork was not designed to "spawn new programs", it was created to allow parallelism on a single program with several processes collaborating on the same task. It's even in the name (i.e. you fork the program in two, not spawn a new process).

I really doubt this. Is there an instance of a program with 1st edition lineage that use processes to achieve concurrency? There were pipes, sure, but that could be achieved with a spawn-like call.

I don’t see processes being used for concurrency in UNIX history until BSD sockets and forking servers emerged.

[mcguire]

Well, yes, fork()/exec() and spawn-like things are capable of doing the same things, more or less.

On the other hand, shell pipelines were used for concurrency before BSD added networking code. And I have doubts that shell pipelines would have developed without the fork()/exec() model---see the author's Windows NT (and earlier) with really, seriously broken shell models.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

spawn() is relatively new and does what used to be done with fork()/exec().