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Effect of execve() Syscall

Question Text​

What is the effect of the execve() syscall?

Question Answers​

  • it spawns a new process as the child of the current one

  • it executes a given shell command

  • it replaces the VAS of the current process with that of the file given as argument
  • it spawns a new shell and executes the given command

Feedback​

The man page says it all:

execve() executes the program referred to by pathname. This causes the program that is currently being run by the calling process to be replaced with a new program, with newly initialized stack, heap, and (initialized and uninitialized) data segments.

Simply put, we can say that execve() replaces the VAS of the current process with that of the program given as argument.