Comment by cryptonector

There is one case where fork() is fantastic: as a way to dump a core of a running process while leaving the process running -- just fork() and abort()! But even this case should be handled by having something like gcore(1).

Another common use of fork() for things other than exec()ing is multi-process services where all will keep running te same program. Arranging to spawn or vfork-then-exec self and have the child realize it's a worker and not a (re)starter is more work because a bunch of state needs to be passed to the child somehow (via an internal interface), and that feels hackish... And also this case doesn't suffer much from fork()s badness: you fork() early and have little or no state in the parent that could have fork-unsafety issues. But it's worth switching this use-case to spawn or vfork-then-exec just so we have no use cases for fork() left.