After forking, are global variables shared?

c linux unix fork
anon picture anon · Nov 28, 2010 · Viewed 51k times · Source

Consider this simple code:

 int myvar = 0;
 int main() {
     if (fork()>0) {
       myvar++;
     } else {
       // father do nothing
     }
 }

When child increments myvar, is the value shared with the father (like pthread)?

Answer

MarkR picture MarkR · Nov 28, 2010

No and yes.

No, they are not shared in any way which is visible to the programmer; the processes can modify their own copies of the variables independently and they will change without any noticable effect on the other process(es) which are fork() parents, siblings or descendents.

But yes, the OS actually does share the pages initially, because fork implements copy-on-write which means that provided none of the processes modifies the pages, they are shared. This is, however, an optimisation which can be ignored.

If you wanted to have shared variables, put them in an anonymous shared mapping (see mmap()) in which case they really will get shared, with all the caveats which come with that.

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