There is a standard C approach to files, but there is also a POSIX standard that is implemented in Linux/Unix and in many ways this is more general than the C file functions. The reason is that once ...

Have you ever wanted to read a file one line at a time in a shell script and found the task to be a lot more trouble than you ever imagined? If you use a “for line ...

On July 30, Al Viro sent a patch set to the linux-fsdevel mailing list with a comprehensive cover letter explaining his recent work on ensuring that the kernel's internal representation of file ...

The lowly file descriptor is one of the fundamental objects in Linux systems. A file descriptor, which is a simple integer value, can refer to an open file — or to a network connection, a running ...

The fcntl i.e. file descriptor control function provides a way of working with a file descriptor to find out the status of the file and to modify the way it is used. It is very similar to the ioctl ...

Last week’s column looked at how we can read from and write to files by associated the files with user-defined file descriptors. This week, we take this idea a bit further. Closing File Descriptors In ...