What is the number of processes generated by forks in this code

#include <stdio.h>
#include<unistd.h>
#include<sys/types.h>
int main(void) {
  pid_t a,b,c;
  a=fork();
  b=fork();
  if(a||b)
    c=fork();
  printf("%d %d %d\n",a,b,c);
}

So I changed this code like this, originally, it was:

#include <stdio.h>
#include<unistd.h>
#include<sys/types.h>
int main(void) {
  if(fork()||fork())
    fork();
  return 0;
}

So by that printf, I would have 5 processes, but is it correct or is it a better way to check the number of processes? Like, printing all rows and getting only the ones with 0 and some other values, after all the forks, is what I did

Solution 1:

They're not equivalent because of the short-circuiting of the || operator.

In the first version,

b = fork();

executes unconditionally in both the parent and the first child. So at this point there are two child processes and a grandchild process.

In the second version,

if (fork() || fork())

creates one child, and then creates a second child only in the original parent process. It doesn't create a grandchild process because the first fork() returns 0 in the child process, so the second fork() is skipped.

I don't think there's a way to make the two equivalent without variables.