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The Linux Programming Interface
book

The Linux Programming Interface

by Michael Kerrisk
October 2010
Intermediate to advanced
1552 pages
45h 39m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from The Linux Programming Interface

23TIMERS AND SLEEPING

A timer allows a process to schedule a notification for itself to occur at some time in the future. Sleeping allows a process (or thread) to suspend execution for a period of time. This chapter describes the interfaces used for setting timers and for sleeping. It covers the following topics:

• the classical UNIX APIs for setting interval timers (setitimer() and alarm()) to notify a process when a certain amount of time has passed;

• the APIs that allow a process to sleep for a specified interval;

• the POSIX.1b clocks and timers APIs; and

• the Linux-specific timerfd facility, which allows the creation of timers whose expirations can be read from a file descriptor.

23.1 Interval Timers

The setitimer() system call establishes ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593272203Errata Page