On `fork`, children processes, and “subshells”

Question

This post is basically a follow-up to an earlier question of mine.

From the answer to that question I realized that not only I don't quite understand the whole concept of a "subshell", but more generally, I don't understand the relationship between fork-ing and children processes.

I used to think that when process X executes a fork, a new process Y is created whose parent is X, but according to the answer to that question,

[a] subshell is not a completely new process, but a fork of the existing process.

The implication here is that a "fork" is not (or does not result in) "a completely new process."

I'm now very confused, too confused, in fact, to formulate a coherent question to directly dispel my confusion.

I can however formulate a question that may lead to enlightenment indirectly.

Since, according to zshall(1), $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv gets sourced whenever a new instance of zsh starts, then any command in $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv that results in the creation of a "a completely new [zsh] process" would result in an infinite regress. On the other hand, including either of the following lines in a $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv file does not result in an infinite regress:

echo $(date; printenv; echo $$) > /dev/null    #1
(date; printenv; echo $$)                      #2

The only way I found to induce an infinite regress by the mechanism described above was to include a line like the following¹ in the $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv file:

$SHELL -c 'date; printenv; echo $$'            #3

My questions are:

1. what difference between the commands marked #1, #2 above and the one marked #3 accounts from this difference in behavior?

2. if the shells that get created in #1 and #2 are called "subshells", what are those like the one generated by #3 called?

3. is it possible to rationalize (and maybe generalize) the empirical/anecdotal findings described above in terms of the "theory" (for lack of a better word) of Unix processes?

The motivation for the last question is to be able to determine ahead of time (i.e. without resorting to experimentation) what commands would lead to an infinite regress if they were included in $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv?

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^{1 The particular sequence of commands date; printenv; echo $$ that I used in the various examples above is not too important. They happen to be commands whose output was potentially helpful towards interpreting the results of my "experiments". (I did, however, want these sequences to consist of more than one command, for the reason explained here.)}

Answer 1

Since, according to zshall(1), $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv gets sourced whenever a new instance of zsh starts

If you focus on the word "starts" here you'll have a better time of things. The effect of fork() is to create another process that begins from exactly where the current process already is. It's cloning an existing process, with the only difference being the return value of fork. The documentation is using "starts" to mean entering the program from the beginning.

Your example #3 runs $SHELL -c 'date; printenv; echo $$', starting an entirely new process from the beginning. It will go through the ordinary startup behaviour. You can illustrate that by, for example, swapping in another shell: run bash -c ' ... ' instead of zsh -c ' ... '. There's nothing special about using $SHELL here.

Examples #1 and #2 run subshells. The shell forks itself and executes your commands inside that child process, then carries on with its own execution when the child is done.

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The answer to your question #1 is the above: example 3 runs an entirely new shell from the start, while the other two run subshells. The startup behaviour includes loading .zshenv.

The reason they call this behaviour out specifically, which is probably what leads to your confusion, is that this file (unlike some others) loads in both interactive and non-interactive shells.

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To your question #2:

if the shells that get created in #1 and #2 are called "subshells", what are those like the one generated by #3 called?

If you want a name you could call it a "child shell", but really it's nothing. It's no different than any other process you start from the shell, be it the same shell, a different shell, or cat.

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To your question #3:

is it possible to rationalize (and maybe generalize) the empirical/anecdotal findings described above in terms of the "theory" (for lack of a better word) of Unix processes?

fork makes a new process, with a new PID, that starts running in parallel from exactly where this one left off. exec replaces the currently-executing code with a new program loaded from somewhere, running from the beginning. When you spawn a new program, you first fork yourself and then exec that program in the child. That is the fundamental theory of processes that applies everywhere, inside and outside of shells.

Subshells are forks, and every non-builtin command you run leads to both a fork and an exec.

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Note that $$ expands to the PID of the parent shell in any POSIX-compatible shell, so you may not be getting the output you expect regardless. Note also that zsh aggressively optimises subshell execution anyway, and commonly execs the last command, or doesn't spawn the subshell at all if all the commands are safe without it.

One useful command for testing your intuitions is:

strace -e trace=process -f $SHELL -c ' ... '

That will print to standard error all process-related events (and no others) for the command ... you run in a new shell. You can see what does and does not run in a new process, and where execs occur.

Another possibly-useful command is pstree -h, which will print out and highlight the tree of parent processes of the current process. You can see how many layers deep you are in the output.

Answer 2

When the manual says the commands in .zshenv are "sourced", it means they are executed within the shell running them. They do not cause a call to fork(), thus they do not spawn a subshell. Your third example explicitly runs a subshell, calling invoking a call to fork(), and thus infinitely recurses. That, I believe, should (at least partially) answer your first question.

2. There is nothing "created" in commands 1 and 2, so there's nothing to be called anything - those commands are run within the context of the sourcing shell.

3. The generalization is the difference between "calling" a shell routine or program and "sourcing" a shell routine or program - with the latter usually only being applicable to shell commands / scripts, not external programs. "Sourcing" a shell script is usually done via . <scriptname> as opposed to ./<scriptname> or /full/path/to/script - note the "dot-space" sequence at the start of the sourcing directive. Sourcing can also be invoked using source <scriptname>, the source command being a shell internal.

Answer 3

fork, assuming all goes well, returns twice. One return is in the parent process (which has the original process ID), and the other in the new child process (a different process ID but otherwise sharing much in common with the parent process). At this point, the child could exec(3) something, which would cause some "new" binary to be loaded into that process, though the child need not do that, and could run other code already loaded via the parent process (zsh functions, for example). Hence, a fork may or may not result in a "completely new" process, if "completely new" is taken to mean something loaded via an exec(3) system call.

Guessing which commands cause infinite regress in advance is tricky; besides the fork-calling-fork case (a.k.a. a "forkbomb"), another easy one is via a naive function wrapper around some command

function ssh() {
   ssh -o UseRoaming=no "$@"
}

which instead probably should be written as

function ssh() {
  =ssh -o UseRoaming=no "$@"
}

or command ssh ... to avoid infinite function calls of the ssh function calling the ssh function calling the ... This in no way involves fork, as the function calls are internal to the ZSH process, but will merrily happen off to infinity until some limit is bumped into by that single ZSH process.

strace, as always, is handy in revealing exactly what system calls are involved for any command (in particular here fork and perhaps some exec call); shells may be debugged with -x or similar that shows what the shell is doing internally (e.g. function calls). For more reading, Stevens in "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment" has a few chapters related to the creation and handling of new processes.