Question

standard UNIX fork() return child's pit to the parent and returns 0 to the child. Instead, imagine that fork() returns 0 to the parent and returns parent's pid to the child. What would be a potential issue with this semantic?

Answer 1

According to the general fork() function. The purpose of fork() is to create a new process, in which becomes the child process of the parent. It returns a process ID.

Below are different values returned by fork().

• If fork() returns a negative value, the creation of a child process was unsuccessful.
• fork() returns a zero to the newly created child process.
• fork() returns a positive value, the process ID of the child process, to the parent.

But the given scenario is distinct.Normally the fork() returns 0 to the parent and in turn child PID from the parent.

Here assuming fork() returns 0 to parent and returns parent's PID to the child means the function fork() is recursively applying on a single process and no child is being created.

For a unique process the same fork() function is calling again and again.If a child got created means compulsorily it will act as dual under same address space and returns child PID to parent process.