UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation

Summary

There are numerous functions provided by the standard I/O library that often reduce the work of an application writer. By aiming to minimize the number of system calls, performance of some applications may be considerably improved. Buffering offers a great deal of flexibility to the application programmer by allowing finer control over how I/O is actually performed.

This chapter highlighted how the standard I/O library is implemented but stops short of describing all of the functions that are available. Richard Steven's book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment [STEV92] provides more details from a programming perspective. Herbert Schildt's book The Annotated ANSI C Standard [SCHI93] provides detailed information on the stdio library as supported by the ANSI C standard.