Processes are the primitive units for allocation of system resources. Each process has its own address space and (usually) one thread of control. A process executes a program; you can have multiple processes executing the same program, but each process has its own copy of the program within its own address space and executes it independently of the other copies.
This chapter explains what your program should do to handle the startup of a process, to terminate its process, and to receive information (arguments and the environment) from the parent process.
| Program Arguments | Parsing your program's command-line arguments. |
| Environment Variables | How to access parameters inherited from a parent process. |
| Program Termination | How to cause a process to terminate and return status information to its parent. |