DESCRIPTION
The execve system call transforms the calling process into a new process. The new process is constructed from an ordinary file, whose name is pointed to by path, called the new process file. This file is either an executable object file, or a file of data for an interpreter. An executable object file consists of an identifying header, followed by pages of data representing the initial program (text) and initialized data pages. Additional pages may be specified by the header to be initialized with zero data; see elf(5) and a.out(5). An interpreter file begins with a line of the form:
#!
interpreter
[arg]
When an interpreter file is execve Ap d, the system actually execve Ap s the specified interpreter. If the optional arg is specified, it becomes the first argument to the interpreter, and the name of the originally execve Ap d file becomes the second argument; otherwise, the name of the originally execve Ap d file becomes the first argument. The original arguments are shifted over to become the subsequent arguments. The zeroth argument is set to the specified interpreter.
The argument argv is a pointer to a null-terminated array of character pointers to null-terminated character strings. These strings construct the argument list to be made available to the new process. At least one argument must be present in the array; by custom, the first element should be the name of the executed program (for example, the last component of path).
The argument envp is also a pointer to a null-terminated array of character pointers to null-terminated strings. A pointer to this array is normally stored in the global variable environ. These strings pass information to the new process that is not directly an argument to the command (see environ(7)).
File descriptors open in the calling process image remain open in the new process image, except for those for which the close-on-exec flag is set (see close(2) and fcntl(2)). Descriptors that remain open are unaffected by execve. If any of the standard descriptors (0, 1, and/or 2) are closed at the time execve is called, and the process will gain privilege as a result of set-id semantics, those descriptors will be re-opened automatically. No programs, whether privileged or not, should assume that these descriptors will remain closed across a call to execve.
Signals set to be ignored in the calling process are set to be ignored in the new process. Signals which are set to be caught in the calling process image are set to default action in the new process image. Blocked signals remain blocked regardless of changes to the signal action. The signal stack is reset to be undefined (see sigaction(2) for more information).
If the set-user-ID mode bit of the new process image file is set (see chmod(2)), the effective user ID of the new process image is set to the owner ID of the new process image file. If the set-group-ID mode bit of the new process image file is set, the effective group ID of the new process image is set to the group ID of the new process image file. (The effective group ID is the first element of the group list.) The real user ID, real group ID and other group IDs of the new process image remain the same as the calling process image. After any set-user-ID and set-group-ID processing, the effective user ID is recorded as the saved set-user-ID, and the effective group ID is recorded as the saved set-group-ID. These values may be used in changing the effective IDs later (see setuid(2)).
The set-ID bits are not honored if the respective file system has the nosuid option enabled or if the new process file is an interpreter file. Syscall tracing is disabled if effective IDs are changed.
The new process also inherits the following attributes from the calling process:
