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by mytailorisrich 441 days ago
I believe this is because on POSIX systems the only way to create a new process is fork().
1 comments

There is the later added posix_spawn, which could be implemented with a system call, even if on Linux it is emulated with clone + exec.

posix_spawn can do much, but not all, of what is possible with clone + exec. Presumably the standard editors have been scared to add too complex function parameters for its invocation, though that should not have been a problem if all parameters had reasonable default values.