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Linux System Programming Techniques

Linux System Programming Techniques

By : Jack-Benny Persson
4.8 (8)
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Linux System Programming Techniques

Linux System Programming Techniques

4.8 (8)
By: Jack-Benny Persson

Overview of this book

Linux is the world's most popular open source operating system (OS). Linux System Programming Techniques will enable you to extend the Linux OS with your own system programs and communicate with other programs on the system. The book begins by exploring the Linux filesystem, its basic commands, built-in manual pages, the GNU compiler collection (GCC), and Linux system calls. You'll then discover how to handle errors in your programs and will learn to catch errors and print relevant information about them. The book takes you through multiple recipes on how to read and write files on the system, using both streams and file descriptors. As you advance, you'll delve into forking, creating zombie processes, and daemons, along with recipes on how to handle daemons using systemd. After this, you'll find out how to create shared libraries and start exploring different types of interprocess communication (IPC). In the later chapters, recipes on how to write programs using POSIX threads and how to debug your programs using the GNU debugger (GDB) and Valgrind will also be covered. By the end of this Linux book, you will be able to develop your own system programs for Linux, including daemons, tools, clients, and filters.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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Getting information about Linux- and Unix-specific header files

There are a lot of specific functions and header files for Linux and other Unix systems. Generally speaking these are POSIX functions, even though some are Linux-specific, such as sysinfo(). We have already seen two of the POSIX files in the previous recipe: unistd.h and sys/types.h. Since they're POSIX files, they're available in all Unix-like systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Solaris.

In this recipe, we will learn more about these POSIX header files, what they do, and when and how you can use them. We will also learn how to look up information about these files in the manual page.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will look up header files in the manual. If you are using a Fedora-based system, such as CentOS, Fedora, or Red Hat, these manual pages are already installed on your system. If for some reason they are missing, you can install them with dnf install man-pages as root, or with...

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