Essential UNIX Programming

Intended Audience: Programmers and system administrators wanting to learn more about the essentials of Unix programming and recent changes. Some programming experience in C is assumed.

This tutorial covers current Unix programming concepts required for systems programming. It does not cover the basic functions that most programmers are familiar with (open, lseek, standard I/O, etc.) but focuses on the poorly documented features that tend to be the least understood. This tutorial also emphasizes the recent additions to the Unix programming toolbag, specifically the 1996 POSIX.1 standard (which includes the realtime and threads extensions) and the Unix 98 system (which includes the Large File Summit and N-bit cleanup [64-bit and beyond]).

The topics covered are:

• current Unix standards,
• file and directory I/O (I/O sharing, POSIX.1 changes, Large File Summit changes),
• process control (startup & termination, race conditions, interpreter files),
• process relationships (sessions, job control, daemons, error logging),
• signals (including POSIX.1 realtime signals),
• record locking,
• I/O multiplexing,
• memory mapped I/O,
• interprocess communication (coprocesses, new POSIX.1 IPC: messages, semaphores, and shared memory),
• POSIX.1 threads.