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A high-level overview of the Linux kernel's system call interface, which handles communication between its various components and the userspace. In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system [a] on which it is executed.
The exec calls named ending with an e alter the environment for the new process image by passing a list of environment settings through the envp argument. This argument is an array of character pointers; each element (except for the final element) points to a null-terminated string defining an environment variable .
Modern operating systems also provide system calls that allow a process's thread to create other threads and wait for them to terminate ("join" them) in a similar fashion. An operating system may provide variations of the wait call that allow a process to wait for any of its child processes to exit , or to wait for a single specific child ...
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time , mass storage , peripherals, and ...
The wait system call is commonly invoked in the SIGCHLD handler. POSIX.1-2001 allows a parent process to elect for the kernel to automatically reap child processes that terminate by explicitly setting the disposition of SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN (although ignore is the default, automatic reaping only occurs if the disposition is set to ignore ...
For a process to start the execution of a different program, it first forks to create a copy of itself. Then, the copy, called the "child process", calls the exec system call to overlay itself with the other program: it ceases execution of its former program in favor of the other. The fork operation creates a separate address space for the ...
For most file systems, a program initializes access to a file in a file system using the open system call. This allocates resources associated to the file (the file descriptor), and returns a handle that the process will use to refer to that file. In some cases the open is performed by the first access.
stat() is a Unix system call that returns file attributes about an inode. The semantics of stat() vary between operating systems. As an example, Unix command ls uses this system call to retrieve information on files that includes: atime: time of last access (ls -lu) mtime: time of last modification (ls -l) ctime: time of last status change (ls -lc)