Last week's article on syslets briefly mentioned a problem with using file descriptors for low-level communications with the kernel. There is a single namespace for file descriptors, combined with a ...

Developers learning the Unix (or POSIX in general) system-call set will quickly encounter file descriptors, which are used to represent open files and more. Developers also tend to learn early on that ...

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 ...

When using a large number of Virtual Hosts, Apache may run out of available file descriptors (sometimes called file handles) if each Virtual Host specifies different log files. The total number of ...

OK, I am trying to convert a small bit of code from using old-style <fstream.h> headers to <fstream>. I am guessing that ofstream::fd() has been deprecated. In that case, what's the established method ...

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 ...