Process Management and Interprocess Communication

This chapter describes the NSPR routines that deal with processes. A process is an instance of a program. NSPR provides routines to create a new process and to wait for the termination of another process.

NSPR does not provide an equivalent of the Unix fork(). The newly-created process executes its program from the beginning. A new process can inherit specified file descriptors from its parent, and the parent can redirect the standard I/O streams of the child process to specified file descriptors.

Note that the functions described in this chapter are not available for MacOS or Win16 operating systems.

Process Management Types and Constants

The types defined for process management are:

• PRProcess 
• PRProcessAttr

Process Management Functions

The process manipulation function fall into these categories:

• Setting the Attributes of a New Process
• Creating and Managing Processes

Setting the Attributes of a New Process

The functions that create and manipulate attribute sets of new processes are:

• PR_NewProcessAttr 
• PR_ResetProcessAttr 
• PR_DestroyProcessAttr 
• PR_ProcessAttrSetStdioRedirect 
• PR_ProcessAttrSetCurrentDirectory 
• PR_ProcessAttrSetInheritableFD

Creating and Managing Processes

The functions that create and manage processes are:

• PR_CreateProcess 
• PR_DetachProcess 
• PR_WaitProcess 
• PR_KillProcess