''fork'' and ''join'' commands in operating systems

[Terminal Velocity]

What is the role of the ''fork'' and ''join'' commands (as part of process mapping) in an operating system and in what ways can we use them?

 

[MattWinter]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. I don't think join is a standard OS command. Fork, however. Will create a new process.
If you're talking about multithreaded programming, fork will create a new thread, while join, I think, will wait for an existing thread to complete before continuing execution.

 

[Terminal Velocity]

Thank you Matt for your answer, I really don't know what they mean, I translated it as best as I could. Afterwards I found this article that might be related:

Fork–join model - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[MattWinter]

Ok. I think at a high level, it allows you to do things like perform calculations that dont rely on each other on different threads, but then use join to wait for them all to finish before continuing execution.