Sign In Start Free Trial
Account

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Book Overview & Buying Linux System Programming Techniques
  • Table Of Contents Toc
  • Feedback & Rating feedback
Linux System Programming Techniques

Linux System Programming Techniques

By : Jack-Benny Persson
4.8 (8)
close
close
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)
close
close

Error handling and errno

Most of the system call functions in Linux and other UNIX-like systems set a special variable called errno when an error occurs. This way, we get a general error code from the return value (often -1) and then more specific information about what went wrong by looking at the errno variable.

In this recipe, we'll learn what errno is, how to read values from it, and when it is set. We'll also see an example use case of errno. Learning about errno is imperative to system programming, primarily since it's used in conjunction with system calls.

The next few recipes in this chapter are closely tied to this recipe. In this recipe, we'll learn about errno; in the following three recipes, we'll learn how to interpret the error codes we get from errno and print human-readable error messages.

Getting ready

You'll need the same components for this recipe that we used in the previous one; that is, the GCC compiler, the Make tool...

Unlock full access

Continue reading for free

A Packt free trial gives you instant online access to our library of over 7000 practical eBooks and videos, constantly updated with the latest in tech

Create a Note

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
notes
bookmark search playlist download font-size

Change the font size

margin-width

Change margin width

day-mode

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected

Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Delete Bookmark

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete

Delete Note

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete

Edit Note

Modal Close icon
Write a note (max 255 characters)
Cancel
Update Note

Confirmation

Modal Close icon
claim successful

Buy this book with your credits?

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to buy this book with one of your credits?
Close
YES, BUY