Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By : Dr. Rian Quinn
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By: Dr. Rian Quinn

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias toward system programming as it provides ready access to hardware-level resources, efficient compilation, and a versatile approach to higher-level abstractions. This book will help you understand the benefits of system programming with C++17. You will gain a firm understanding of various C, C++, and POSIX standards, as well as their respective system types for both C++ and POSIX. After a brief refresher on C++, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), and the new C++ Guideline Support Library (GSL), you will learn to program Linux and Unix systems along with process management. As you progress through the chapters, you will become acquainted with C++'s support for IO. You will then study various memory management methods, including a chapter on allocators and how they benefit system programming. You will also explore how to program file input and output and learn about POSIX sockets. This book will help you get to grips with safely setting up a UDP and TCP server/client. Finally, you will be guided through Unix time interfaces, multithreading, and error handling with C++ exceptions. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with using C++ to program high-quality systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Unix signals

Unix signals provide the ability to interrupt a given process, and allow a child to receive this interruption and handle it any way they wish.

Specifically, Unix signals provide the user with the ability to handle specific types of control flow and errors that might occur, such as a Terminal attempting to close your program, or a segmentation fault that might be recoverable.

See the following example:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <iostream>

int main(void)
{
while(true) {
std::cout << "Hello World\n";
sleep(1);
}
}

// > g++ scratchpad.cpp; ./a.out
// Hello World
// Hello World
// Hello World
// ...
// ^C

In the preceding example, we create a process that executes forever, outputting Hello World every second. To stop this application, we must use the CTRL+C command, which tells the shell to terminate the process. This is done...