4

Process Control

A process represents a running program. It’s the abstraction through which memory, processor time, and I/O resources can be managed and monitored.

It is an axiom of the UNIX philosophy that as much work as possible be done within the context of processes rather than being handled specially by the kernel. System and user processes follow the same rules, so you can use a single set of tools to control them both.

4.1 Components of a process

A process consists of an address space and a set of data structures within the kernel. The address space is a set of memory pages that the kernel has marked for the process’s ...

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