Re: luuid vs. forks

[Florian Weimer <fw@...>]

* Alexander Gladysh:

>>> This looks wrong to me. Also it (indirectly) breaks my tests. So I want to
>>> ask — is this normal, or my setup is broken?
>
>> Your setup is broken, or more likely, the underlying random number
>> generator.  fork() makes creating a good one really tricky on UNIX.
>> RAND_bytes() from OpenSSL allegedly gets this right, or you can open
>> /dev/urandom directly---but you have to make sure you've disabled
>> buffered I/O in that case.
>
> Thanks.
>
> I'd like to avoid writing my own libuuid for OS X though...

Ah, I see.  Obviously, that library isn't fork-safe.  I think on Mac
OS X, the focus is on threading and not so much on forking, so you're
better off switching from a fork() to a fork()/execve() combination.
Chances are that other libraries you might use don't survive forking,
either.

fork() is unsafe, really.