From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-02-17T08:47:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Controlling a forked process

Michael Satterwhite wrote:
> What is causing the first call to fork to be tied to the first process
> and the second call to fork to be tied to the second process?

Because the first call to fork is both spawning and returning the 
process id that was spawned.

> Is it 
> simply that it's returning the pid of the most recently spawned process?
>   

Close. It is returning the pid of the process that this particular call 
to fork spawned.

This is effectively the same, but you're overthinking it. Let me make it 
as simple as I possibly can:

this_pid = fork { this child body }

No matter where you do that in your code, or how often you do it, that 
code will always do what you expect. The variable on the left will 
always receive the pid corresponding to the process which is now running 
the code on the right.