Hi, I had read that the operating systems that use copy-on-write mechanism for fork(), it is better if they deliberately allow the CHILD to run first. This would be better because in 99% of the cases child will call exec() and the new address space will be allocated. Instead if the parent is executes first, an unnecessary copy of the pages is made (if parents writes) and later on when child executes, a fresh address space is executed. So in linux, is a child run first or the parent? Can we rely on this information? TIA Rick - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs