Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)

Re:Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016) by jepler on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @01:27PM (#31742870)

I think this turns out to be a tangent, but at least superficially it is possible for a C program to "do" shell pipelines without use of fork or vfork (directly) but rather by posix_spawn. I suppose "portable go" does not directly wrap posix_spawn so this option may not be on the table for you.

Basics: https://gist.github.com/ec8469273c7808d46c7285cd056d0104

Typical use: `./a.out seq 3 2 9 -- cat -n` is similar to `seq 3 2 9 | cat -n` except that the return value is nonzero if either side's return value is nonzero.

that said, I wouldn't be surprised if there's something important I'm overlooking here.

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Re:Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016) by chubot on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @01:55PM (#31743279)

Hm very interesting. I haven't used or seen posix_spawn() used before, but I saw in a recent thread that Ninja uses it, so that's a positive sign.

I saved this here! https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/1161

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