fork call tree builder

Instructions to run:

compile fork.c
gcc fork.c -o fork.out
Run the compiled code
./fork.out

How it works:

C code

The c program asks the user the number of times it should fork. After every fork the parent waits for the child to complete using wait system call and whenever a leaf fork child completes execution all the nodes in that path from the parent resume execution from bottom up and write to the output.txt file in the format PARENT parent_pid CHILD child_pid this does not cause race condition because of the wait call.

Python code

Then the python file tree_generator.py is invoked which parses data in output.txt and creates a dictionary where keys are pids of parents and value is list of pids of child processes, this list is then used to create a tree and the tree is dumped as a json object to tree.json file which contains node values as the pid of every process.

Results:

The sample tree.json contains results for 7 consecutive fork calls.