sousa-gecko/docs/nspr/reference/process_management_and_interprocess_communication.md

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.

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Process Management Types and Constants

The types defined for process management are:

• {ref}PRProcess
• {ref}PRProcessAttr

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Process Management Functions

The process manipulation function fall into these categories:

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

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Setting the Attributes of a New Process

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

• {ref}PR_NewProcessAttr
• PR_ResetProcessAttr
• PR_DestroyProcessAttr
• PR_ProcessAttrSetStdioRedirect
• PR_ProcessAttrSetCurrentDirectory
• PR_ProcessAttrSetInheritableFD

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Creating and Managing Processes

The functions that create and manage processes are:

• PR_CreateProcess
• PR_DetachProcess
• PR_WaitProcess
• PR_KillProcess