[erlang-questions] How to fork/clone a process in Erlang?

[Magnus Henoch]

Xiao Jia <stfairy@REDACTED> writes:

> How can I fork/clone a process in Erlang, just as the fork in Unix?
>
> I have searched a lot but just got nothing related to that. I suppose the
> usage may look like this:
>
> case fork() of
>   {parent, Pid} -> in_parent_process_now();
>   {child, Pid} -> in_child_process_now();
> end.
>
> Any ideas?

There is nothing called "fork" in Erlang, but you can achieve pretty
much the same effect using 'spawn'.  For example, your example could be
written as:

ParentPid = self(),
ChildPid = spawn(fun() -> in_child_process_now(ParentPid) end),
in_parent_process_now(ChildPid).

That is, the child process starts executing in the function passed to
'spawn', and the parent process keeps executing after the call to
'spawn'.

Hope this helps,
Magnus