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Video of A Reading of Chapter 8 - The UNIX System Interface in C Programming course by Chuck Severance channel, video No. 36 free certified online
This lecture covers Chapter 8 of the 1978 C Programming book by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, which details the interface between C programs and the Unix operating system. The chapter explains that all input and output in Unix is handled through file descriptors (0 for standard input, 1 for standard output, 2 for standard error), and describes the low-level read and write system calls for direct file operations. It also covers the open, create, close, and unlink functions for file management.
The chapter further details random access using lseek, the implementation of standard library functions such as fopen and getc using file descriptors, and the historical context of C as a systems programming language. This 1978 book was foundational for modern computing, providing a portable approach to systems programming that influenced the development of later languages including Python, PHP, and Java.
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