[nyrikki]

Luckily someone with a time machine saw your post and added it to POSIX.1-2001 :)

(Sorry if you weren't joking) but yes, posix_spawn() has been a thing and in glibc fork is just a alias to clone()

Not exactly that OP idea, but fork/exec is legacy really.

[MayCXC]

other people in the thread say that posix_spawn is more or less implemented as a fork+exec wrapper though? it sounds like the idea is more like if there were a separate deferred_fork that made an intermediate "process factory" that let you set up a process without actually creating a new one until the exec. obviously the if() construct would have to be replaced with an in-process handle that mimics calls to the posix api.