Book Image

Linux System Programming Techniques

By : Jack-Benny Persson
5 (1)
Book Image

Linux System Programming Techniques

5 (1)
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)

Technical requirements

For this chapter, you'll need the GCC compiler, the Make tool, and all the manual pages (dev and POSIX) installed. We covered how to install GCC and Make in Chapter 1, Getting the Necessary Tools and Writing Our First Linux Programs, and the manual pages in Chapter 3, Diving Deep into C in Linux. You will also need the generic Makefile that we created in Chapter 3, Diving Deep into C in Linux. Place that file in the same directory as the code you are writing for this chapter. You'll find a copy of that file—along with all other source code files we will write here—in the GitHub folder for this chapter, at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Linux-System-Programming-Techniques/tree/master/ch4.

Check out the following link to see the Code in Action video: https://bit.ly/3iE1W17