Process Execution

To provide a network-leveraging environment, the Common Desktop Environment provides the Sub Process Control (SPC) mechanism to start, manage, and collect results from applications running on a remote host. A remote host installs an SPC daemon that serves as the remote end of a socket-based control mechanism. This control mechanism tries to maintain the illusion that the remote process is a local child to the parent process. Authentication of the user that owns the parent process is based upon the ability of the parent process to write a setuid file to the user's home directory and the ability of the child process to read the result.

The SPC API and associated control programs are private to the Common Desktop Environment. Actions represent the public API for running applications remotely.