fork

fork

1. a small usually metal implement consisting of two, three, or four long thin prongs on the end of a handle, used for lifting food to the mouth or turning it in cooking, etc.

2. an agricultural tool consisting of a handle and three or four metal prongs, used for lifting, digging, etc.

3. Chess a position in which two pieces are forked

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

fork

(operating system)

A Unix system call used by a process (the "parent") to make a copy (the "child") of itself. The child process is identical to the parent except it has a different process identifier and a zero return value from the fork call. It is assumed to have used no resources.

A fork followed by an exec can be used to start a different process but this can be inefficient and some later Unix variants provide vfork as an alternative mechanism for this.

See also fork bomb.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

fork

(1) To split into two. See forked version, hard fork and Bitcoin fork.

(2) In Unix, to make a copy of a process for execution.

(3) In the Mac file system, a fork is a top- level structure that separates data folders and files from other resources. See HFS.

(4) In a SIP telephony system, to search multiple locations for a recipient. See forking proxy.

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