Endorsed. Even fork _with_ exec can be real trouble. This is one of my bugaboos at work: due to poor life choices and high pain tolerance, I own the infrastruc

Endorsed. Even fork _with_ exec can be real trouble. This is one of my bugaboos at work: due to poor life choices and high pain tolerance, I own the infrastructure we use to spawn subprocesses (carefully.) For various reasons (security most notably) we have to do some very tricky things in and to the forked child before exec(), and pretty much all of this code is a disaster waiting to happen. Every so often I get feature requests for more stupid pet tricks people would like out of subprocesses, and they're always surprised by what their "simple" change would entail. I'd like it if Linux had native support for posix_spawn, but even that would require a lot of extensions to be useful. Don't get me started on the teams that want to break forking rules and thus ask me how to guarantee a process has no non-main threads. There are few ways you can make me more upset than by building software that breaks if some one else happens to call pthread_create and doesn't tell you.