A long time ago in the 70s when everyone smoked a lot of dope, someone thought it would be cute to break the application launch APIs into two pieces. First you call fork to clone yourself (but this is really fast because the OS is lazy) and then execve turns one copy into something new. Cute!
I just learned two interesting things about Mac OS X tonight:
1. Apparently fork without execve won’t always work.
2. execve without fork doesn’t work so well either.
In the first case, you can read here about why forking doesn’t always work. In Apple’s defense, I don’t blame them for this - fork is supposed to be fast, and cloning all of the apps resources wouldn’t be. Oh yeah, some of those resources might be owned in some exclusive mode. Historically fork was a way to use processes like threads. Or are threads processes? I don’t know…it’s 2:30 AM and my brain hurts.
In the second case, frankly I have no idea why execve won’t work on its own. I get error 45:
#define ENOTSUP 45 /* Operation not supported */
My speculation is that execve requires a “clean” process of some type, e.g. a forked process and not a regular one.
Either way the moral of the story is clear: apparently no one has tried to use these two functions separately since they made disco illegal, so neither should you. Fork even if you don’t need to, then kill off the parent.
