Question

How can you use C to spawn an independent child process that goes about its business without thinking about the father?

I want to spawn several processes and shortly after they have been created they go to sleep for about 2 minutes before they do their job.

However, I don’t want the father to wait until the child is finished because in the meantime I want to spawn off more processes.

I’m on Linux.

Answer 1

Use fork().
The fork() System Call

pid_t pid = fork (); 
if (pid < 0) 
  // Error
else if (pid == 0) 
  // Child Process
  // Sleep 2 min. ?!
else 
  // Code for Father