Top Unix Inter – Process Communication Interview Questions
Q – 1 Explain a zombie?
Ans- A system that has been taken over using Remote Control Software. Zombies are often used to send spam or to attack remote servers with an overwhelming amount of traffic (a Distributed Denial of Service Attack).
Q – 2 What is Daemon?
Ans- The processes like vhand, bdflush, sched are housed in kernel file or /unix system which are known as daemons.
These files run in the background without users request.These are created when the system boots up and remains active till it shut down or hang. These are not linked to any user or any terminal .We can’t kill a daemon.
Q – 3 What Happens when we execute a Unix command?
Ans- When command is given then unix os will fork the shell i.e will creat a new process and will execute the command using
exec command…something like suppose you gave command “ls” in the shell then…
fork();
exec(ls);
It will give you the result and after this the child process
will die.
Q – 4 What is an advantage of executing a process in background?
Ans- There r two main advantage :
1.you can use console to execute your command.
2.More importantly if one is connected through remote console and as there is no controlling terminal attached to
background process even if your terminal get disconnected the process continues (with help of nohup in shell script or by using setsid in C)
Q – 5 How do you execute one program from within another?
Ans- by calling system call fork() to create child process which
handles the other.
Q – 6 What is IPC? What are the various schemes available?
Ans- Inter Process Communication. IPC is used to pass information between two or more processes.
Schemes are pipes, shared memory & semaphore.
Below are the different IPC methods
1. Semaphores
2. FIFO’s (Also called Named Pipes)
3. Message Queues
4. Shared Memory
Q – 7 Please Describe the initial process sequence while the system boots up?
Ans- -Hardware Boot
-Read boot block (block 0) and load to memory
-Transfer control to kernel
-Kernel initialization
-Mount the root file system on / and create environment for process 0
-Process 0 invokes process 1(init process)
-init process invokes process getty
-gettyinvokes login
Q – 8 What are the system calls used for process management:
Ans- The system calls for process management are
Fork() > create child process
Vfork() > create child process (copy-on-write only)
exec() > exec to do a different task
wait() > wait for a process to complete execution
kill() > to send a signal to a process
signal() > to handle a signal
sigaction() > handle signal
exit() > exit from a process execution
_exit() > same as exit() but with out clean up
and many more …………….
Q – 9 How to write the program on full-duplex communication on bidirectional(e.g using two pipes)?
Ans- #include
#include
#include
#include<sys/ipc.h>
#include<sys/types.h>
int main()
{
int p1[2],p2[2],i;
char buf[5];
pipe(p1);
pipe(p2);
if(fork()==0)
{
printf(“n this is child(the input text is text)n”);
close(p1[0]);
close(p2[1]);
write(p1[1],”text”,5);
read(p2[0],buf,5);
write(1,buf,5);
}
else
{
printf(“n this is parent(the output text is text)n”);
close(p2[0]);
close(p1[1]);
read(p1[0],buf,5)
for(i=0;i<4;i++) buf[i]=to upper(buf[i]); write(p2[1],buf,5) } }
Q – 10 What is semaphone?
Ans- a semaphor is nothing but a term used in unix for a variable which acts as a counter.for instance there may be
times when two processes try to access the same file simultaneously.in this event we must control the access of
the when the other process is accessing this is done by assigning value to a semaphore. the value of the semaphore is initialized by the 1st process when the file is in access by it.
when the 2nd process try to access the file it checks the value of the semaphore and if it finds the value as initialized it does
not access the file.
Q – 11 Explain What is the process id for kernel process?
Ans- The Process id are sequentially numbered and the first process id created is ‘ PID 0’, which loads the data structures and resources of Kernel which also forks the next process “INIT” which has the process id ‘1’.
Q – 12 What is the process id for kernel process?
Ans- zero(0)
Q – 13 What is the very first process created by kernel?
Ans- The first process in Unix is INIT.
Q – 14 Explain Linking across directories?
Ans- It’s possible through both symbolic and hard links. However, hard links are only possible if both source and destination
belong to the same volume.
Q – 15 What is ln(linking)?
Ans- Linking is also two types.
1>Hard link.
2>soft link.
For hard :-
ln
for softlink :-
ln -s
Q – 16 What is fork()?
Ans- Fork system call is used to create a new process. Fork is called onces and returns twice.It will return 0 to the newly created process (child process) and process id of child to the calling process(parent process).
The child process gets copy of parents data, stack and heap segement.The code segement is common for both.Both the
processes will resume execution from the command next to fork.Scheduler decide which process to run first.
Q – 17 Max relax-able permission value with out giving write permission to others?
Ans- chmod 755
Q – 18 What is i-node numbers?
Ans- File is identified by the I-node number in linux.Kernel uses inode number to access the file. It is unique for the
perticular filesystem. Inode contains all the information about the file like , file size, access permissions, time
stamp , uid , gid , pointers to data blocks..etc.
Q – 19 What is the condition required for dead lock in Unix system?
Ans- deadlock occurs because of
1.no preembtion
2.circular waiting i.e.. when A process is waiting for the resources which are held by the procees B,which is waiting for the resources engaged by process A.
Q – 20 Tell me set-user-id is related to (in unix)?
Ans- setuid short for set user ID upon execution is Unix access rights flag that allow users to run an executable with the
permissions of the executable’s owner. This is often used to allow users on a computer system to run programs with
temporarily elevated privileges in order to perform a specific task.
While the assumed user id privileges provided are not always elevated, at a minimum that is specific. setuid and setgid are needed for tasks that require higher privileges than those which a common user has, such as
changing his or her login password.
Some of the tasks that require elevated privileges may not immediately be obvious, though – such as the ping command, which must send and listen for control packets on a network interface.
Q – 21 Explain the initial process sequence while the system boots up?
Ans- While booting, special process called the ‘swapper’ or ‘scheduler’ is created by the Process-ID 0. The swapper
manages memory allocation for processes and influences CPU allocation.
The swapper in turn creates 3 children:
the
process dispatcher, vhand, etc…
Q – 22 What are various IDs associated with a process?
Ans- Real User id, Effective User Id, saved user id.
Real Group id, Effective Group Id, saved Group id.
Q – 23 Please Explain fork() system call?
Ans- fork is a system call used for creating child processes of a parent process.it returns the process id of the created
child process.after that pid(process id ) is checked if it is negative,it means no child process is created,pid==0
implies the id of the newly created process and pid>0 is the id of child process given to the parent process.
the statements following fork system call are executed by both the parent and child process.and one more thing,the parent
and child process have the exact copy of address space but it exist separately for the two processes.
Q – 24 Predict the output of the following program code
main()
{
fork();
printf(“Hello World!”);
}
Ans- prints Hello world Hello world
All the statements after the call to fork() will be
executed twice
Q – 25 What are the system calls used for process management?
Ans- This should not allow to increase process priority.
Q – 26 How to get or set an environment variable from a program?
Ans- to get environment variable execute getenv(); to set environment variable execute setenv();