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Open 3 terminals, which I'll call A, B, and C, and execute the following:

  1. socat TCP-LISTEN:12345,fork - in A,
  2. pidof socat in B,
  3. socat TCP-CONNECT:localhost:12345 - in C,
  4. pidof socat again in B.

Step 2 will print 1 PID, whereas step 4 will print 3 PIDs, meaning that step 3 spawned 2 processes (whereas step 1 definitely spawned only 1).

Why is that? Is it an (uniteresting?) implementation detail of socat? Or is it necessary for socat to work?

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1 Answer 1

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2

It's no surprise socat listener spawns an extra process as it is literally instructed to do so by option fork.

Removing fork results in just two PIDs printed by step 4.

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1 Comment

Darn! I've been entering that line in the command line so many times I've become blind to it :'D

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