Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment: Second Edition
by W. Richard Stevens, Stephen A. Rago
Chapter 3. File I/O
Introduction
We’ll start our discussion of the UNIX System by describing the functions available for file I/O—open a file, read a file, write a file, and so on. Most file I/O on a UNIX system can be performed using only five functions: open, read, write, lseek, and close. We then examine the effect of various buffer sizes on the read and write functions.
The functions described in this chapter are often referred to as unbuffered I/O, in contrast to the standard I/O routines, which we describe in Chapter 5. The term unbuffered means that each read or write invokes a system call in the kernel. These unbuffered I/O functions are not part of ISO C, but are part of POSIX.1 and the Single UNIX Specification.
Whenever we describe the ...
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