Each operating system has many system calls. These calls differ from one operating system to another, while doing very close things. Boost provides portable and safe wrappers around those calls. Knowledge of wrappers is essential for writing good programs.
This chapter is devoted to working with the operating system. We already saw how to deal with network communications and signals in Chapter 6, Manipulating Tasks. In this chapter, we'll take a closer look at the filesystem, creating, and deleting files. We'll see how data can be passed between different system processes, how to read files at maximum speed, and how to perform other tricks.