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Packages » Macaulay2Doc > The Macaulay2 language > system facilities > fork

Synopsis

• Usage:

  fork()

• Outputs:
  • When successful, it returns the process id of the child in the parent, and returns 0 in the child. When unsuccessful, it returns -1.

Description

Platforms that do not have a built-in fork() function will always return -1.

Warning: in multithreaded programs like Macaulay2, very few operations can be safely done in the child. This is especially true when the user has been parallel programming with threads and tasks. Even allocating memory in the child may hang the process.