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

In this chapter, we'll need all the usual tools, such as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler, the Make tool, and the generic Makefile, but we'll also need a program called screen. If you don't already have it, you can install it with your distribution's package manager—for example, sudo apt-get install screen for Debian/Ubuntu, or sudo dnf install screen for CentOS/Fedora.

All code samples for this chapter can be downloaded from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Linux-System-Programming-Techniques/tree/master/ch9.

Check out the following link to see the Code in Action video: https://bit.ly/2O8j7Lu