When you fork a process, the child inherits its parent's file descriptors. I understand that when this happens, the child receives a copy of the parent's file descriptor table with the pointers in each pointing to the same open file description. Is this the same thing as a file table, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_descriptor, or something else?
What is an open file description?
file descriptors;fork;processes
I found the answer in documentation for the open system call:The term open file description is the one used by POSIX to refer to the entries in the system-wide table of open files. In other contexts, this object is variously also called an open file object, a file handle, an open file table entry, orin kernel-developer parlancea struct file. When a file descriptor is duplicated (using dup(2) or similar), the duplicate refers to the same open file description as the original file descriptor, and the two file descriptors consequently share the file offset and file status flags. Such sharing can also occur between processes: a child process created via fork(2) inherits duplicates of its parent's file descriptors, and those duplicates refer to the same open file descriptions. Each open(2) of a file creates a new open file description; thus, there may be multiple open file descriptions corresponding to a file inode.