Comment by cryptonector

> The intent of fork() is to start a new process in its own address space.

True!

> That *fork() variations that run in the SAME address space are confusing.

Why is it confusing? They are distinct and different system calls, with different semantics. They are also sufficiently similar that they are also similarly named. But there's nothing confusing about their semantics. vfork() is not harder to use than fork() -- it's just subtly different.

> A use case today for fork() might also be sandboxing apps. Certainly I expect browsers use this approach to spawn unique pages.

I wouldn't expect that. Sandboxing is a large and complex topic.*