Linux System Programming, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. File I/O

This and the subsequent three chapters cover files. Because so much of a Unix system is represented as files, these chapters discuss the crux of a Unix system. This chapter covers the basics of file I/O, detailing the system calls that comprise the simplest and most common ways to interact with files. The next chapter covers standard I/O from the standard C library; Chapter 4 continues the coverage with a treatment of the more advanced and specialized file I/O interfaces. Chapter 8 rounds out the discussion by addressing the topic of file and directory manipulation.

Before a file can be read from or written to, it must be opened. The kernel maintains a per-process list of open files, called the file table. This table is indexed via nonnegative integers known as file descriptors (often abbreviated fds). Each entry in the list contains information about an open file, including a pointer to an in-memory copy of the file’s backing inode and associated metadata, such as the file position and access modes. Both user space and kernel space use file descriptors as unique cookies: opening a file returns a file descriptor, while subsequent operations (reading, writing, and so on) take the file descriptor as their primary argument.

File descriptors are represented by the C int type. Not using a special type is often considered odd, but is, historically, the Unix way. Each Linux process has a maximum number of files that it may open. File descriptors start at 0 and go up to ...