Hello,

when I read about posix_spawn, I tried to see where it could be used, and 
shells seemed like a natural place to start. All the shells I looked at use 
fork, except for csh and tcsh that have the possibility to use vfork. Now I 
notice that on solaris 9, csh defines VFORK but not tcsh, and AFAICS this is 
still the case now. I tried to compile my own version of tcsh (the 6.14.00 
version) after defining VFORK in config/sol26, and I get a very significant 
performance boost (and if I use the -F flag (use fork instead of vfork) I go 
back to the regular performances of solaris tcsh). Is there a reason why tcsh 
on solaris does not use vfork? Is it less stable?
(tcsh still does not always use vfork, for instance it uses vfork for 
"/bin/true" but fork for "repeat 1 /bin/true", but it is already better than 
nothing)

While I am here, does using posix_spawn (or some vfork variant) for other 
shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh) sound like a reasonable option? It seems to me that 
the whole point of posix_spawn should be to make it possible (even easy?), but 
it does not look that good when I take a look at the code (with which I admit I 
am not familiar).

Thank you for any insight.
 
 
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