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fork() is not per se "dangerous" in such context. You just have to be careful enough and only use asynchronous-signal-safe fonctions, as you would do in a signal handler (see https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/c/SIG30...)

Typically calls such as malloc(), printf() etc. are strictly forbidden in the child after a fork().

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Only if your app is multi-threaded. Unfortunately, many apps are multi-threaded "under the covers" due to libraries that spawn threads, so you need to be careful.

This post does the best job explaining the issue: http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/threads-and-fork-think-t...

This is possible, but I find these restrictions to be hard to follow. As soon as you need to call a function, you now need to audit that function to determine that it only calls other async signal safe functions. When you come back to the code to fix a bug six months later, you need to remember these restrictions.

Do this when you must, but it is easy to screw up.

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