A Unixsystem call used by a process (the "parent") to make a copy (the "child") of itself.The child process is identical to the parent except it has a different process identifier and a zero return value from the fork call.It is assumed to have used no resources.A fork followed by an exec can be used to start a different process but this can be inefficient and some later Unix variants provide vfork as an alternative mechanism for this.See also fork bomb.(1996-12-08)