Linux Application Development, Second Edition

Chapter 13. Advanced File Handling

Files are used for a large number of tasks in the Linux world, such as persistent data storage in regular files, networking through sockets, and device access through device files. The variety of applications for files has led to the development of many specialized ways of manipulating files. Chapter 11 introduced the most common operations on files, and this chapter discusses some more specialized file operations. In this chapter, we cover using multiple files simultaneously, mapping files into system memory, file locking, and scatter/gather reads and writes.

Input and Output Multiplexing

Many client/server applications need to read input from or write output to multiple file descriptors at a time. For example, ...