Advanced UNIX progamming

Fall 2002
Instructor: Ashok Srinivasan
Lecture 7

Acknowledgements: The syllabus and power point presentations are modified versions of those by
T. Baker and X. Yuan

Announcements
Reading assignment
APUE Chapter 3
Pages 47-56, 56-62

APUE Chapter 5
Section 5.4 is particularly important

APUE Chapter 7
Section 7.3 is important
You should know the material from 7.1, 7.2, 7.4 7.9
from previous courses and classes

APUE Chapter 8
Sections 8.1-8.3, 8.5-8.6, 8.9-8.10
You should also understand the idea behind race
conditions

Review
UNIX file system
File system abstraction
Directories
File descriptors

Week 3 Topics
UNIX file system
File system abstraction
Directories
File descriptors

Unix API Programming Examples and

Techniques
Example with direct IO
open, close, fdopen, lseek, unlink

Variable argument list

HW1 hints

Week 3 Topics ... continued

File I/O
File descriptors
open, creat, close, dup, dup2

I/O redirection

Process management
fork, exit, wait, waitpid, execv

Pipes
Named and unnamed pipes
Implementing pipe in a shell

UNIX file system

File system abstraction
Directories
File descriptors

File Descriptors ... review

File Descriptors ... continued

The POSIX standard defines the following
File descriptor: A per-process, unique,
nonnegative integer used to identify an open file
for the purposes of file access
Open file description: A record of how a process
or group of processes are currently accessing a
file
Each file descriptor refers to exactly one open file
description, but an open file description may be referred
to by more than one file descriptor
A file offset, file status, and file access modes are
attributes of an open file description

File access modes: Specification of whether the

file can be read and written

File Descriptors ... continued

File offset: The byte position in the file where the
next I/O operation through that open file
description begins
Each open file description associated with a regular file,
block special file, or directory has a file offset
There is no file offset specified for a pipe or FIFO
(described later)

File status: Includes the following information

append mode or not
blocking/nonblocking
Etc

File Descriptors ... continued

FIFO special file: A type of file with the property
that data written to such a file is read on a first-infirst-out basis
Pipe: An object accessed by one of the pair of file
descriptors created by the pipe() function
Once created, the file descriptors can be used to
manipulate the pipe, and it behaves identically to a FIFO
special file when accessed this way
It has no name in the file hierarchy

File Descriptors ... continued

Important points
A file descriptor does not describe a file
It is just a number that is ephemerally associated with a
particular open file description

An open file description describes a past "open"

operation on a file; its does not describe the file
The description of the file is in the inode
There may be several different open file descriptors (or
none) referring at it any given time

Unix API Programming

Examples and Techniques
Examples with direct IO
open, close, fdopen, lseek, unlink

Variable argument list

Note:
Read the POSIX standard and sse man
pages to get information on system calls
Look into the system header files
Example: /usr/include/sys/types.h

Direct I/O
Using open()
The usual C-language stream-oriented I/O
operations, like printf(), use buffers and process
data character-by-character
They are implemented using the lower-level direct
I/O operations read() and write()
In situations where we do not want to view the
data as characters, or where we want greater
efficiency, it is better to use the direct I/O
operations

Using man
Look at the man page for write()
If there is more than one page on a given name, man will
give you the one that is first in the chapter order of the
Unix manual.
Shell commands are in Section 1, I/O and OS interface
calls are in Section 2 and Section 3 respectively

Specification of section number varies

On Red Hat Linux, type man 2 write or man -S 2 write to
see the page on write from Section 2 of the Unix manual
On Solaris, you can type man -s 2 write

man page for open

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
Solaris 2.6 includes the following synopsis
int open(const char *path, int oflag, /* mode_t mode */ ...);

Red Hat Linux 6.2

int open(const char *pathname, int flags, mode_t mode);

1996 POSIX standard synopsis is as follows

int open(const char *path, int oflag, ...);

The latest official POSIX/Unix synopsis

No <sys/types.h>
What does the ... mean here? Will a compiler allow this in an actual
program?

Variable Argument Lists

The ... indicates a variable number of
arguments
Similar to that in printf()
For more on variable argument lists, look
at the file /usr/include/stdarg.h
Functions with variable argument lists can
be dangerous
It is difficult to check types, and the use of a
correct number of arguments

Example Programs
example1.c illustrates a common
programming error
Failure to provide the correct number of
arguments to a vararg function

example2.c illustrates opening a file

File I/O
File descriptors
open, creat, close, dup, dup2

I/O redirection

File descriptors
Implication of the file descriptor/open file
descriptions/inode table organization in UNIX
open and creat
search for the first empty slot in the process file
descriptor table
allocate an open file description in the file table, which
has a pointer to the inode table
See example3.c

dup and dup2

Duplicate the file descriptor in the process file descriptor
table
See example3b.c
Where is the current file position stored?

I/O redirection
All UNIX processes have three predefined
files open
stdin -- STDIN_FILENO (0)
stdout -- STDOUT_FILENO (1)
stderr -- STDERR_FILENO (2)

We can redirect the I/O by manipulating these

file descriptors
See example4.c and example5.c