What is the difference between a process and a thread?

Question

What is the technical difference between a process and a thread?

I get the feeling a word like \'process\' is overused and there are also hardware and software threa

Answer 1

I've perused almost all answers there, alas, as an undergraduate student taking OS course currently I can't comprehend thoroughly the two concepts. I mean most of guys read from some OS books the differences i.e. threads are able to access to global variables in the transaction unit since they make use of their process' address space. Yet, the newly question arises why there are processes, cognizantly we know already threads are more lightweight vis-à-vis processes. Let's glance at the following example by making use of the image excerpted from one of the prior answers,

We have 3 threads working at once on a word document e.g. Libre Office. The first does spellchecking by underlining if the word is misspelt. The second takes and prints letters from keyboard. And the last does save document in every short times not to lose the document worked at if something goes wrong. In this case, the 3 threads cannot be 3 processes since they share a common memory which is the address space of their process and thus all have access to the document being edited. So, the road is the word document along with two bulldozers which are the threads though one of them is lack in the image.