This report covers the work and results for the Operating Systems 1 Unit 2 programming assignment in which we were instructed to create a program that called fork() and had the child and parent processes handle a variable, I used ‘x’, that had been previously assigned a value. As part of that, we were to examine the effects on the variable within both the parent and child, the effects of altering the variable within each, and the end result of the program. In order to use fork(), I needed to be able to run the C code that I wrote outside for my normal Windows operating system. To do that I downloaded the Cygwin64 terminal in order to have a Unix-like environment in which to compile and run the program using fork() (Cygwin, n.d.). I was …show more content…
I then ran the file, obtaining the following result.
The value of the variable within both the child and parent process retained the original value of the starting variable, 100, when the fork occurred. Despite both processes making alterations to the variable, neither paths alterations affected the other as each was an independent process running separately at the time the alterations were made. Each independently altered and retained their own ‘x’ variable values and states.

Conclusion: Despite the fact that the code for the program only has a single ‘x’ variable, when the process calls the fork function each ‘x’ is assigned its own memory space that is in use by either the parent or child process respectively. To someone reading the code, it might appear as if there is only a single variable being handled that should retain its state as any alterations are made to it. However, each parent ‘x’ and child ‘x’ has their data in different addresses in memory, due to the forked processes, and their alterations are completely independent of one another within the child and