I know that it's generally a bad idea for a thread in a multithreaded
processes to call fork(), at least under Linux 2.4. Is it still a bad
idea if the child process immediately calls exec()? How about if it
calls dup2() and then execs? If not, what are the problems?

Context: I have a threaded program, not of my own creation, in which
several threads (10-40) act as filters on a huge amount of data (over
1 GB). Currently this program is dependent on the data coming through
the pipes in sorted order. In order to remove this restriction, I'd
like each of these threads to fork off a /bin/sort process.

(Unfortunately, trying to fork off the proper number of sort proceses
before the first call to pthread_create() isn't feasible, not without
a huge rewrite. The idea here is to avoid doing major surgery on this
code, which is non-trivial and wholly uncommented.)

b

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"Brian Raiter" <blr@drizzle.com> wrote in message
news:bvc96v$h78$1@drizzle.com...

quote:

>I know that it's generally a bad idea for a thread in a multithreaded
> processes to call fork(), at least under Linux 2.4. Is it still a bad
> idea if the child process immediately calls exec()? How about if it
> calls dup2() and then execs? If not, what are the problems?



It should be just fine.

DS

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