Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian

Overview of this book

The Linux OS and its embedded and server applications are critical components of today’s software infrastructure in a decentralized, networked universe. The industry's demand for proficient Linux developers is only rising with time. Hands-On System Programming with Linux gives you a solid theoretical base and practical industry-relevant descriptions, and covers the Linux system programming domain. It delves into the art and science of Linux application programming— system architecture, process memory and management, signaling, timers, pthreads, and file IO. This book goes beyond the use API X to do Y approach; it explains the concepts and theories required to understand programming interfaces and design decisions, the tradeoffs made by experienced developers when using them, and the rationale behind them. Troubleshooting tips and techniques are included in the concluding chapter. By the end of this book, you will have gained essential conceptual design knowledge and hands-on experience working with Linux system programming interfaces.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Signaling - Part I

Signals are a crucial mechanism for the Linux system developer to understand and exploit. We cover this rather large topic over two chapters in this book, this chapter and the next one.

In this chapter, the reader is introduced to what signals are, why they are useful to the systems developer, and, most importantly of course, how exactly the developer is to handle and thus exploit the signalling mechanism.

We will continue this exploration in the next chapter.

In this chapter, the reader will learn the following:

  • What exactly signals are.
  • Why they are useful.
  • The available signals.
  • How exactly you can handle signals in an application, which really involves many things—blocking or unblocking signals, writing safe handlers, getting rid of pesky zombies once and for all, working with apps where the signal volume is high, and more.
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