UNIX Programming and Technical

Q. How do you execute one program from within another?

A. The system calls used for low-level process creation are execlp() and execvp(). The execlp call overlays the existing program with the new one , runs that and exits. The original program gets back control only when an error occurs.
execlp(path,file_name,arguments..); //last argument must be NULL
A variant of execlp called execvp is used when the number of arguments is not known in advance.
execvp(path,argument_array); //argument array should be terminated by NULL

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UNIX Other Question

Q. What is an advantage of executing a process in background?

A. The most common reason to put a process in the background is to allow you to do something else interactively without waiting for the process to complete. At the end of the command you add the special background symbol, &. This symbol tells your shell to execute the given command in the background.
Example: cp *.* ../backup& (cp is for copy) Q. What is IPC? What are the various schemes available?

A. The term IPC (Inter-Process Communication) describes various ways by which different process running on some operating system communicate between each other. Various schemes available are as follows:
Pipes:
One-way communication scheme through which different process can communicate. The problem is that the two processes should have a common ancestor (parent-child relationship). However this problem was fixed with the introduction of named-pipes (FIFO).
Message Queues :
Message queues can be used between related and unrelated processes running on a machine.
Shared Memory:
This is the fastest of all IPC schemes. The memory to be shared is mapped into the address space of the processes (that are sharing). The speed achieved is attributed to the fact that there is no kernel involvement. But this scheme needs synchronization.
Various forms of synchronisation are mutexes, condition-variables, read-write locks, record-locks, and semaphores.