multiprocessing question

well i'm sorta new to muliprocessing to the point were i can use fork() two different ways. One way is to have one main program and have it fork to do different processes. The second way is to have 2 mains and one process just forks into the second main process have both mains run simutaneously. But I wanted to use the second method with two mains, but I dont know how to interproccess communicate the info to each other like if i was sending in an array from one process to another how to do this.

"Interprocess communication" is something you have to set up between the processes, using a pipe or socket to send messages back and forth.

If you want to share variable directly, you need to use the pthread library or something similar.

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Originally Posted by kiros88

well i'm sorta new to muliprocessing to the point were i can use fork() two different ways. One way is to have one main program and have it fork to do different processes. The second way is to have 2 mains and one process just forks into the second main process have both mains run simutaneously. But I wanted to use the second method with two mains, but I dont know how to interproccess communicate the info to each other like if i was sending in an array from one process to another how to do this.

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If the two processes are going to communicate a lot, you should consider using threads instead of separate processes. If processes are really what you want, the usual way of communicating data between them is pipes.

You can use pipes (there are various types), shared memory, signals, etc... What method you use depends on your needs. I learned from this tutorial, and other references are abundant: 6 Linux Interprocess Communications

Well I'm developing a network program so I'm not really sure if two processes are better then threads but I just thought since I have a seperate process taking in network frames and then a seperate one using the frame for its own application would it be smarter to just do that all in one process with multiple threads?

If I understand you correctly, then yes it would be better to use 1 process with multiple threads. You have 1 thread receiving packets of the wire, and another thread processing those packets. It's a pretty common design pattern if you are not using non-blocking sockets or select().