Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By : Onorato Vaticone
Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By: Onorato Vaticone

Overview of this book

C++ is the preferred language for system programming due to its efficient low-level computation, data abstraction, and object-oriented features. System programming is about designing and writing computer programs that interact closely with the underlying operating system and allow computer hardware to interface with the programmer and the user. The C++ System Programming Cookbook will serve as a reference for developers who want to have ready-to-use solutions for the essential aspects of system programming using the latest C++ standards wherever possible. This C++ book starts out by giving you an overview of system programming and refreshing your C++ knowledge. Moving ahead, you will learn how to deal with threads and processes, before going on to discover recipes for how to manage memory. The concluding chapters will then help you understand how processes communicate and how to interact with the console (console I/O). Finally, you will learn how to deal with time interfaces, signals, and CPU scheduling. By the end of the book, you will become adept at developing robust systems applications using C++.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Starting a new process

This recipe will show how to start a new process programmatically. The C++ standard does not include any support for processes, so the Linux native implementation will be used. Being able to manage processes in a program is an important skill, and this recipe will teach you the fundamental concepts of processes, the process identifier (PID), the parent PID, and the system calls needed.

How to do it...

This recipe will show how to start a child process and how to make the parent process wait for the child to finish by using Linux system calls. Two different techniques shall be shown: the first, where the parent just forks the child; and the second, where the child process uses the execl system call...