January 2004
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
11h 1m
English
When an established thread desires to replace its logical memory view with that of another program, “changing its stripes,” so to speak, it places a system call to exec(). The exec() call is passed the name of an executable file. The file may be either a compiled binary image or a text file to be processed as a script by an interpreter program such as the POSIX shell or PERL.
In the case of a compiled program, the file starts with a header written in a format recognizable to the operating system and containing a “magic number” indicating the hardware platform, O/S type, and version for which the code was compiled. If the magic number does not match those acceptable to the kernel, an error message ...
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