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Process (computing) In computing, a process is the instance of a computer program that is being executed by one or many threads. There are many different process models, some of which are light weight, but almost all processes (even entire virtual machines) are rooted in an operating system (OS) process which comprises the program code ...
System call. A high-level overview of the Linux kernel's system call interface, which handles communication between its various components and the userspace. In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system [a] on which it is executed.
File descriptor. In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor ( FD, less frequently fildes) is a process-unique identifier ( handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket. File descriptors typically have non-negative integer values, with negative values being reserved to indicate "no ...
Execution of process creation system call by a running process. A user request to create a new process. Initiation of a batch job. When an operating system is booted, typically several processes are created. Some of these are foreground processes, that interact with a (human) user and perform work for them.
A process control block ( PCB ), also sometimes called a process descriptor, is a data structure used by a computer operating system to store all the information about a process . When a process is created (initialized or installed), the operating system creates a corresponding process control block, which specifies and tracks the process state ...
Create an entry in the device-status table. [77] The operating system maintains this table to keep track of which processes are waiting for which devices. One field in the table is the memory address of the process control block. Place all the characters to be sent to the device into a memory buffer. [66]
fork (system call) In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C standard library wrapper to ...
Pipeline (Unix) A pipeline of three program processes run on a text terminal. In Unix-like computer operating systems, a pipeline is a mechanism for inter-process communication using message passing. A pipeline is a set of processes chained together by their standard streams, so that the output text of each process ( stdout) is passed directly ...