There is a standard C approach to files, but there is also a POSIX standard that is implemented in Linux/Unix and in many ways this is more general than the C file functions. The reason is that once ...

Last week's article on syslets briefly mentioned a problem with using file descriptors for low-level communications with the kernel. There is a single namespace for file descriptors, combined with a ...

alrite, so I'm trying to use the select function to tail a file to see when it has information ready to be input, but it needs to know the file descriptor of the ifstream to be able to work. I've ...

Have you ever wanted to read a file one line at a time in a shell script and found the task to be a lot more trouble than you ever imagined? If you use a “for line ...

The classic Unix system design has many advantages, but friendliness to library code is not always one of them. The problem, at its core, is the use of global structures and mechanisms that cannot be ...

There is a standard C approach to files, but there is also a POSIX standard that is implemented in Linux/Unix and in many ways this is more general than the C file functions. The reason is that once ...

Last week’s column looked at how we can read from and write to files by associated the files with user-defined file descriptors. This week, we take this idea a bit further. Closing File Descriptors In ...