A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Programming in C

One of the main reasons the GNU/Linux system provides an excellent C programming environment is that C programs can easily access the services of the operating system. The system calls—the routines that make operating system services available to programmers—can be called from C programs. The system calls provide such services as creating files, reading from and writing to files, collecting information about files, and sending signals to processes. When you write a C program, you can use the system calls in the same way you use ordinary C program modules, or functions, that you have written. For more information, refer to “System Calls” on page 868.

A variety of libraries of functions have been developed to support programming ...