On Friday 07 January 2005 08:22, Mandeep Sandhu wrote: > a simple "man" on the shell wud cause the shell to fork a new > process...cal exec to load "man's" code into the addr. space to > start execution and "wait" (not sure of this!) for this child (i.e > man here) to finish....right? does the shell handle calling "exec" > from the prompt differently?!? $ man The shell will do a fork() and the child will do an exec(man). The parent will wait for the child to finish $ exec man The shell will do an exec(man) -- the shell is gone. $ exec man & The shell will run "exec man" in the background. It will call fork() but not wait. The child will exec(man). This is not much different from just "man &" -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
