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FORK(3am)                  GNU Awk Extension Modules                 FORK(3am)
NAME
       fork, wait, waitpid - basic process management
SYNOPSIS
       @load "fork"
       pid = fork()
       ret = waitpid(pid)
       ret = wait();
DESCRIPTION
       The fork extension adds three functions, as follows.
       fork() This  function  creates  a  new process. The return value is the
              zero in the child and the process-id number of the child in  the
              parent,  or  -1  upon error. In the latter case, ERRNO indicates
              the problem.  In the child, PROCINFO["pid"] and PROCINFO["ppid"]
              are updated to reflect the correct values.
       waitpid()
              This  function takes a numeric argument, which is the process-id
              to wait for. The return value is that of the  waitpid(2)  system
              call.
       wait() This  function  waits  for  the  first child to die.  The return
              value is that of the wait(2) system call.
BUGS
       There is no corresponding exec() function.
       The interfaces could be enhanced to provide more facilities,  including
       pulling out the various bits of the return status.
EXAMPLE
       @load "fork"
       ...
       if ((pid = fork()) == 0)
           print "hello from the child"
       else
           print "hello from the parent"
SEE ALSO
       GAWK:   Effective   AWK   Programming,   filefuncs(3am),  fnmatch(3am),
       inplace(3am), ordchr(3am), readdir(3am), readfile(3am), revoutput(3am),
       rwarray(3am), time(3am).
       fork(2), wait(2), waitpid(2).
AUTHOR
       Arnold Robbins, arnold AT skeeve.com.
COPYING PERMISSIONS
       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, Free Software Foundation, Inc.
       Permission  is  granted  to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
       manual page provided the copyright notice and  this  permission  notice
       are preserved on all copies.
       Permission  is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
       manual page under the conditions for verbatim  copying,  provided  that
       the  entire  resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
       permission notice identical to this one.
       Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this  man-
       ual page into another language, under the above conditions for modified
       versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a  trans-
       lation approved by the Foundation.
Free Software Foundation          Jan 15 2013                        FORK(3am)