This is libc.info, produced by makeinfo version 6.5 from libc.texinfo. This file documents the GNU C Library. This is ‘The GNU C Library Reference Manual’, for version 2.28. Copyright © 1993–2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being “Free Software Needs Free Documentation” and “GNU Lesser General Public License”, the Front-Cover texts being “A GNU Manual”, and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". (a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual. Buying copies from the FSF supports it in developing GNU and promoting software freedom.” INFO-DIR-SECTION Software libraries START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * Libc: (libc). C library. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY INFO-DIR-SECTION GNU C library functions and macros START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * ALTWERASE: (libc)Local Modes. * ARGP_ERR_UNKNOWN: (libc)Argp Parser Functions. * ARG_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * BC_BASE_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * BC_DIM_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * BC_SCALE_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * BC_STRING_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * BRKINT: (libc)Input Modes. * BUFSIZ: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * CCTS_OFLOW: (libc)Control Modes. * CHAR_BIT: (libc)Width of Type. * CHILD_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * CIGNORE: (libc)Control Modes. * CLK_TCK: (libc)Processor Time. * CLOCAL: (libc)Control Modes. * CLOCKS_PER_SEC: (libc)CPU Time. * COLL_WEIGHTS_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * CPU_CLR: (libc)CPU Affinity. * CPU_ISSET: (libc)CPU Affinity. * CPU_SET: (libc)CPU Affinity. * CPU_SETSIZE: (libc)CPU Affinity. * CPU_ZERO: (libc)CPU Affinity. * CREAD: (libc)Control Modes. * CRTS_IFLOW: (libc)Control Modes. * CS5: (libc)Control Modes. * CS6: (libc)Control Modes. * CS7: (libc)Control Modes. * CS8: (libc)Control Modes. * CSIZE: (libc)Control Modes. * CSTOPB: (libc)Control Modes. * DTTOIF: (libc)Directory Entries. * E2BIG: (libc)Error Codes. * EACCES: (libc)Error Codes. * EADDRINUSE: (libc)Error Codes. * EADDRNOTAVAIL: (libc)Error Codes. * EADV: (libc)Error Codes. * EAFNOSUPPORT: (libc)Error Codes. * EAGAIN: (libc)Error Codes. * EALREADY: (libc)Error Codes. * EAUTH: (libc)Error Codes. * EBACKGROUND: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADE: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADF: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADFD: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADMSG: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADR: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADRPC: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADRQC: (libc)Error Codes. * EBADSLT: (libc)Error Codes. * EBFONT: (libc)Error Codes. * EBUSY: (libc)Error Codes. * ECANCELED: (libc)Error Codes. * ECHILD: (libc)Error Codes. * ECHO: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHOCTL: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHOE: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHOK: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHOKE: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHONL: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHOPRT: (libc)Local Modes. * ECHRNG: (libc)Error Codes. * ECOMM: (libc)Error Codes. * ECONNABORTED: (libc)Error Codes. * ECONNREFUSED: (libc)Error Codes. * ECONNRESET: (libc)Error Codes. * ED: (libc)Error Codes. * EDEADLK: (libc)Error Codes. * EDEADLOCK: (libc)Error Codes. * EDESTADDRREQ: (libc)Error Codes. * EDIED: (libc)Error Codes. * EDOM: (libc)Error Codes. * EDOTDOT: (libc)Error Codes. * EDQUOT: (libc)Error Codes. * EEXIST: (libc)Error Codes. * EFAULT: (libc)Error Codes. * EFBIG: (libc)Error Codes. * EFTYPE: (libc)Error Codes. * EGRATUITOUS: (libc)Error Codes. * EGREGIOUS: (libc)Error Codes. * EHOSTDOWN: (libc)Error Codes. * EHOSTUNREACH: (libc)Error Codes. * EHWPOISON: (libc)Error Codes. * EIDRM: (libc)Error Codes. * EIEIO: (libc)Error Codes. * EILSEQ: (libc)Error Codes. * EINPROGRESS: (libc)Error Codes. * EINTR: (libc)Error Codes. * EINVAL: (libc)Error Codes. * EIO: (libc)Error Codes. * EISCONN: (libc)Error Codes. * EISDIR: (libc)Error Codes. * EISNAM: (libc)Error Codes. * EKEYEXPIRED: (libc)Error Codes. * EKEYREJECTED: (libc)Error Codes. * EKEYREVOKED: (libc)Error Codes. * EL2HLT: (libc)Error Codes. * EL2NSYNC: (libc)Error Codes. * EL3HLT: (libc)Error Codes. * EL3RST: (libc)Error Codes. * ELIBACC: (libc)Error Codes. * ELIBBAD: (libc)Error Codes. * ELIBEXEC: (libc)Error Codes. * ELIBMAX: (libc)Error Codes. * ELIBSCN: (libc)Error Codes. * ELNRNG: (libc)Error Codes. * ELOOP: (libc)Error Codes. * EMEDIUMTYPE: (libc)Error Codes. * EMFILE: (libc)Error Codes. * EMLINK: (libc)Error Codes. * EMSGSIZE: (libc)Error Codes. * EMULTIHOP: (libc)Error Codes. * ENAMETOOLONG: (libc)Error Codes. * ENAVAIL: (libc)Error Codes. * ENEEDAUTH: (libc)Error Codes. * ENETDOWN: (libc)Error Codes. * ENETRESET: (libc)Error Codes. * ENETUNREACH: (libc)Error Codes. * ENFILE: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOANO: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOBUFS: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOCSI: (libc)Error Codes. * ENODATA: (libc)Error Codes. * ENODEV: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOENT: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOEXEC: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOKEY: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOLCK: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOLINK: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOMEDIUM: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOMEM: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOMSG: (libc)Error Codes. * ENONET: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOPKG: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOPROTOOPT: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOSPC: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOSR: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOSTR: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOSYS: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTBLK: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTCONN: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTDIR: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTEMPTY: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTNAM: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTRECOVERABLE: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTSOCK: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTSUP: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTTY: (libc)Error Codes. * ENOTUNIQ: (libc)Error Codes. * ENXIO: (libc)Error Codes. * EOF: (libc)EOF and Errors. * EOPNOTSUPP: (libc)Error Codes. * EOVERFLOW: (libc)Error Codes. * EOWNERDEAD: (libc)Error Codes. * EPERM: (libc)Error Codes. * EPFNOSUPPORT: (libc)Error Codes. * EPIPE: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROCLIM: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROCUNAVAIL: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROGMISMATCH: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROGUNAVAIL: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROTO: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROTONOSUPPORT: (libc)Error Codes. * EPROTOTYPE: (libc)Error Codes. * EQUIV_CLASS_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * ERANGE: (libc)Error Codes. * EREMCHG: (libc)Error Codes. * EREMOTE: (libc)Error Codes. * EREMOTEIO: (libc)Error Codes. * ERESTART: (libc)Error Codes. * ERFKILL: (libc)Error Codes. * EROFS: (libc)Error Codes. * ERPCMISMATCH: (libc)Error Codes. * ESHUTDOWN: (libc)Error Codes. * ESOCKTNOSUPPORT: (libc)Error Codes. * ESPIPE: (libc)Error Codes. * ESRCH: (libc)Error Codes. * ESRMNT: (libc)Error Codes. * ESTALE: (libc)Error Codes. * ESTRPIPE: (libc)Error Codes. * ETIME: (libc)Error Codes. * ETIMEDOUT: (libc)Error Codes. * ETOOMANYREFS: (libc)Error Codes. * ETXTBSY: (libc)Error Codes. * EUCLEAN: (libc)Error Codes. * EUNATCH: (libc)Error Codes. * EUSERS: (libc)Error Codes. * EWOULDBLOCK: (libc)Error Codes. * EXDEV: (libc)Error Codes. * EXFULL: (libc)Error Codes. * EXIT_FAILURE: (libc)Exit Status. * EXIT_SUCCESS: (libc)Exit Status. * EXPR_NEST_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * FD_CLOEXEC: (libc)Descriptor Flags. * FD_CLR: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * FD_ISSET: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * FD_SET: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * FD_SETSIZE: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * FD_ZERO: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * FE_SNANS_ALWAYS_SIGNAL: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * FILENAME_MAX: (libc)Limits for Files. * FLUSHO: (libc)Local Modes. * FOPEN_MAX: (libc)Opening Streams. * FP_ILOGB0: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * FP_ILOGBNAN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * FP_LLOGB0: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * FP_LLOGBNAN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * F_DUPFD: (libc)Duplicating Descriptors. * F_GETFD: (libc)Descriptor Flags. * F_GETFL: (libc)Getting File Status Flags. * F_GETLK: (libc)File Locks. * F_GETOWN: (libc)Interrupt Input. * F_OFD_GETLK: (libc)Open File Description Locks. * F_OFD_SETLK: (libc)Open File Description Locks. * F_OFD_SETLKW: (libc)Open File Description Locks. * F_OK: (libc)Testing File Access. * F_SETFD: (libc)Descriptor Flags. * F_SETFL: (libc)Getting File Status Flags. * F_SETLK: (libc)File Locks. * F_SETLKW: (libc)File Locks. * F_SETOWN: (libc)Interrupt Input. * HUGE_VAL: (libc)Math Error Reporting. * HUGE_VALF: (libc)Math Error Reporting. * HUGE_VALL: (libc)Math Error Reporting. * HUGE_VAL_FN: (libc)Math Error Reporting. * HUGE_VAL_FNx: (libc)Math Error Reporting. * HUPCL: (libc)Control Modes. * I: (libc)Complex Numbers. * ICANON: (libc)Local Modes. * ICRNL: (libc)Input Modes. * IEXTEN: (libc)Local Modes. * IFNAMSIZ: (libc)Interface Naming. * IFTODT: (libc)Directory Entries. * IGNBRK: (libc)Input Modes. * IGNCR: (libc)Input Modes. * IGNPAR: (libc)Input Modes. * IMAXBEL: (libc)Input Modes. * INADDR_ANY: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * INADDR_BROADCAST: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * INADDR_LOOPBACK: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * INADDR_NONE: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * INFINITY: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * INLCR: (libc)Input Modes. * INPCK: (libc)Input Modes. * IPPORT_RESERVED: (libc)Ports. * IPPORT_USERRESERVED: (libc)Ports. * ISIG: (libc)Local Modes. * ISTRIP: (libc)Input Modes. * IXANY: (libc)Input Modes. * IXOFF: (libc)Input Modes. * IXON: (libc)Input Modes. * LINE_MAX: (libc)Utility Limits. * LINK_MAX: (libc)Limits for Files. * L_ctermid: (libc)Identifying the Terminal. * L_cuserid: (libc)Who Logged In. * L_tmpnam: (libc)Temporary Files. * MAXNAMLEN: (libc)Limits for Files. * MAXSYMLINKS: (libc)Symbolic Links. * MAX_CANON: (libc)Limits for Files. * MAX_INPUT: (libc)Limits for Files. * MB_CUR_MAX: (libc)Selecting the Conversion. * MB_LEN_MAX: (libc)Selecting the Conversion. * MDMBUF: (libc)Control Modes. * MSG_DONTROUTE: (libc)Socket Data Options. * MSG_OOB: (libc)Socket Data Options. * MSG_PEEK: (libc)Socket Data Options. * NAME_MAX: (libc)Limits for Files. * NAN: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * NCCS: (libc)Mode Data Types. * NGROUPS_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * NOFLSH: (libc)Local Modes. * NOKERNINFO: (libc)Local Modes. * NSIG: (libc)Standard Signals. * NULL: (libc)Null Pointer Constant. * ONLCR: (libc)Output Modes. * ONOEOT: (libc)Output Modes. * OPEN_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * OPOST: (libc)Output Modes. * OXTABS: (libc)Output Modes. * O_ACCMODE: (libc)Access Modes. * O_APPEND: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_ASYNC: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_CREAT: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_EXCL: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_EXEC: (libc)Access Modes. * O_EXLOCK: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_FSYNC: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_IGNORE_CTTY: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_NDELAY: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_NOATIME: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_NOCTTY: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_NOLINK: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_NONBLOCK: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_NONBLOCK: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_NOTRANS: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_RDONLY: (libc)Access Modes. * O_RDWR: (libc)Access Modes. * O_READ: (libc)Access Modes. * O_SHLOCK: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_SYNC: (libc)Operating Modes. * O_TMPFILE: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_TRUNC: (libc)Open-time Flags. * O_WRITE: (libc)Access Modes. * O_WRONLY: (libc)Access Modes. * PARENB: (libc)Control Modes. * PARMRK: (libc)Input Modes. * PARODD: (libc)Control Modes. * PATH_MAX: (libc)Limits for Files. * PA_FLAG_MASK: (libc)Parsing a Template String. * PENDIN: (libc)Local Modes. * PF_FILE: (libc)Local Namespace Details. * PF_INET6: (libc)Internet Namespace. * PF_INET: (libc)Internet Namespace. * PF_LOCAL: (libc)Local Namespace Details. * PF_UNIX: (libc)Local Namespace Details. * PIPE_BUF: (libc)Limits for Files. * P_tmpdir: (libc)Temporary Files. * RAND_MAX: (libc)ISO Random. * RE_DUP_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * RLIM_INFINITY: (libc)Limits on Resources. * R_OK: (libc)Testing File Access. * SA_NOCLDSTOP: (libc)Flags for Sigaction. * SA_ONSTACK: (libc)Flags for Sigaction. * SA_RESTART: (libc)Flags for Sigaction. * SEEK_CUR: (libc)File Positioning. * SEEK_END: (libc)File Positioning. * SEEK_SET: (libc)File Positioning. * SIGABRT: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGALRM: (libc)Alarm Signals. * SIGBUS: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGCHLD: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGCLD: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGCONT: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGEMT: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGFPE: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGHUP: (libc)Termination Signals. * SIGILL: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGINFO: (libc)Miscellaneous Signals. * SIGINT: (libc)Termination Signals. * SIGIO: (libc)Asynchronous I/O Signals. * SIGIOT: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGKILL: (libc)Termination Signals. * SIGLOST: (libc)Operation Error Signals. * SIGPIPE: (libc)Operation Error Signals. * SIGPOLL: (libc)Asynchronous I/O Signals. * SIGPROF: (libc)Alarm Signals. * SIGQUIT: (libc)Termination Signals. * SIGSEGV: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGSTOP: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGSYS: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGTERM: (libc)Termination Signals. * SIGTRAP: (libc)Program Error Signals. * SIGTSTP: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGTTIN: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGTTOU: (libc)Job Control Signals. * SIGURG: (libc)Asynchronous I/O Signals. * SIGUSR1: (libc)Miscellaneous Signals. * SIGUSR2: (libc)Miscellaneous Signals. * SIGVTALRM: (libc)Alarm Signals. * SIGWINCH: (libc)Miscellaneous Signals. * SIGXCPU: (libc)Operation Error Signals. * SIGXFSZ: (libc)Operation Error Signals. * SIG_ERR: (libc)Basic Signal Handling. * SNAN: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * SNANF: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * SNANFN: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * SNANFNx: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * SNANL: (libc)Infinity and NaN. * SOCK_DGRAM: (libc)Communication Styles. * SOCK_RAW: (libc)Communication Styles. * SOCK_RDM: (libc)Communication Styles. * SOCK_SEQPACKET: (libc)Communication Styles. * SOCK_STREAM: (libc)Communication Styles. * SOL_SOCKET: (libc)Socket-Level Options. * SSIZE_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * STREAM_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * SUN_LEN: (libc)Local Namespace Details. * S_IFMT: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISBLK: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISCHR: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISDIR: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISFIFO: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISLNK: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISREG: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_ISSOCK: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_TYPEISMQ: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_TYPEISSEM: (libc)Testing File Type. * S_TYPEISSHM: (libc)Testing File Type. * TMP_MAX: (libc)Temporary Files. * TOSTOP: (libc)Local Modes. * TZNAME_MAX: (libc)General Limits. * VDISCARD: (libc)Other Special. * VDSUSP: (libc)Signal Characters. * VEOF: (libc)Editing Characters. * VEOL2: (libc)Editing Characters. * VEOL: (libc)Editing Characters. * VERASE: (libc)Editing Characters. * VINTR: (libc)Signal Characters. * VKILL: (libc)Editing Characters. * VLNEXT: (libc)Other Special. * VMIN: (libc)Noncanonical Input. * VQUIT: (libc)Signal Characters. * VREPRINT: (libc)Editing Characters. * VSTART: (libc)Start/Stop Characters. * VSTATUS: (libc)Other Special. * VSTOP: (libc)Start/Stop Characters. * VSUSP: (libc)Signal Characters. * VTIME: (libc)Noncanonical Input. * VWERASE: (libc)Editing Characters. * WCHAR_MAX: (libc)Extended Char Intro. * WCHAR_MIN: (libc)Extended Char Intro. * WCOREDUMP: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WEOF: (libc)EOF and Errors. * WEOF: (libc)Extended Char Intro. * WEXITSTATUS: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WIFEXITED: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WIFSIGNALED: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WIFSTOPPED: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WSTOPSIG: (libc)Process Completion Status. * WTERMSIG: (libc)Process Completion Status. * W_OK: (libc)Testing File Access. * X_OK: (libc)Testing File Access. * _Complex_I: (libc)Complex Numbers. * _Exit: (libc)Termination Internals. * _IOFBF: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * _IOLBF: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * _IONBF: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * _Imaginary_I: (libc)Complex Numbers. * _PATH_UTMP: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * _PATH_WTMP: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * _POSIX2_C_DEV: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX2_C_VERSION: (libc)Version Supported. * _POSIX2_FORT_DEV: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX2_FORT_RUN: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX2_LOCALEDEF: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX2_SW_DEV: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED: (libc)Options for Files. * _POSIX_JOB_CONTROL: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX_NO_TRUNC: (libc)Options for Files. * _POSIX_SAVED_IDS: (libc)System Options. * _POSIX_VDISABLE: (libc)Options for Files. * _POSIX_VERSION: (libc)Version Supported. * __fbufsize: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * __flbf: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * __fpending: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * __fpurge: (libc)Flushing Buffers. * __freadable: (libc)Opening Streams. * __freading: (libc)Opening Streams. * __fsetlocking: (libc)Streams and Threads. * __fwritable: (libc)Opening Streams. * __fwriting: (libc)Opening Streams. * __gconv_end_fct: (libc)glibc iconv Implementation. * __gconv_fct: (libc)glibc iconv Implementation. * __gconv_init_fct: (libc)glibc iconv Implementation. * __ppc_get_timebase: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_get_timebase_freq: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_mdoio: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_mdoom: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_set_ppr_low: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_set_ppr_med: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_set_ppr_med_high: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_set_ppr_med_low: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_set_ppr_very_low: (libc)PowerPC. * __ppc_yield: (libc)PowerPC. * __riscv_flush_icache: (libc)RISC-V. * __va_copy: (libc)Argument Macros. * _exit: (libc)Termination Internals. * _flushlbf: (libc)Flushing Buffers. * _tolower: (libc)Case Conversion. * _toupper: (libc)Case Conversion. * a64l: (libc)Encode Binary Data. * abort: (libc)Aborting a Program. * abs: (libc)Absolute Value. * accept: (libc)Accepting Connections. * access: (libc)Testing File Access. * acos: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * acosf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * acosfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * acosfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * acosh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * acoshf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * acoshfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * acoshfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * acoshl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * acosl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * addmntent: (libc)mtab. * addseverity: (libc)Adding Severity Classes. * adjtime: (libc)High-Resolution Calendar. * adjtimex: (libc)High-Resolution Calendar. * aio_cancel64: (libc)Cancel AIO Operations. * aio_cancel: (libc)Cancel AIO Operations. * aio_error64: (libc)Status of AIO Operations. * aio_error: (libc)Status of AIO Operations. * aio_fsync64: (libc)Synchronizing AIO Operations. * aio_fsync: (libc)Synchronizing AIO Operations. * aio_init: (libc)Configuration of AIO. * aio_read64: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * aio_read: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * aio_return64: (libc)Status of AIO Operations. * aio_return: (libc)Status of AIO Operations. * aio_suspend64: (libc)Synchronizing AIO Operations. * aio_suspend: (libc)Synchronizing AIO Operations. * aio_write64: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * aio_write: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * alarm: (libc)Setting an Alarm. * aligned_alloc: (libc)Aligned Memory Blocks. * alloca: (libc)Variable Size Automatic. * alphasort64: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * alphasort: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * argp_error: (libc)Argp Helper Functions. * argp_failure: (libc)Argp Helper Functions. * argp_help: (libc)Argp Help. * argp_parse: (libc)Argp. * argp_state_help: (libc)Argp Helper Functions. * argp_usage: (libc)Argp Helper Functions. * argz_add: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_add_sep: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_append: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_count: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_create: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_create_sep: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_delete: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_extract: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_insert: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_next: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_replace: (libc)Argz Functions. * argz_stringify: (libc)Argz Functions. * asctime: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * asctime_r: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * asin: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * asinf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * asinfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * asinfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * asinh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * asinhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * asinhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * asinhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * asinhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * asinl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * asprintf: (libc)Dynamic Output. * assert: (libc)Consistency Checking. * assert_perror: (libc)Consistency Checking. * atan2: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atan2f: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atan2fN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atan2fNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atan2l: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atan: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atanf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atanfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atanfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atanh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * atanhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * atanhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * atanhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * atanhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * atanl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * atexit: (libc)Cleanups on Exit. * atof: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * atoi: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * atol: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * atoll: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * backtrace: (libc)Backtraces. * backtrace_symbols: (libc)Backtraces. * backtrace_symbols_fd: (libc)Backtraces. * basename: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * basename: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * bcmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * bcopy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * bind: (libc)Setting Address. * bind_textdomain_codeset: (libc)Charset conversion in gettext. * bindtextdomain: (libc)Locating gettext catalog. * brk: (libc)Resizing the Data Segment. * bsearch: (libc)Array Search Function. * btowc: (libc)Converting a Character. * bzero: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * cabs: (libc)Absolute Value. * cabsf: (libc)Absolute Value. * cabsfN: (libc)Absolute Value. * cabsfNx: (libc)Absolute Value. * cabsl: (libc)Absolute Value. * cacos: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * cacosf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * cacosfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * cacosfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * cacosh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cacoshf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cacoshfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cacoshfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cacoshl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cacosl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * call_once: (libc)Call Once. * calloc: (libc)Allocating Cleared Space. * canonicalize: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * canonicalize_file_name: (libc)Symbolic Links. * canonicalizef: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * canonicalizefN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * canonicalizefNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * canonicalizel: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * carg: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cargf: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cargfN: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cargfNx: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cargl: (libc)Operations on Complex. * casin: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * casinf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * casinfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * casinfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * casinh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * casinhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * casinhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * casinhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * casinhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * casinl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catan: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catanf: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catanfN: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catanfNx: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catanh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * catanhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * catanhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * catanhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * catanhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * catanl: (libc)Inverse Trig Functions. * catclose: (libc)The catgets Functions. * catgets: (libc)The catgets Functions. * catopen: (libc)The catgets Functions. * cbrt: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cbrtf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cbrtfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cbrtfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cbrtl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ccos: (libc)Trig Functions. * ccosf: (libc)Trig Functions. * ccosfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * ccosfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * ccosh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ccoshf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ccoshfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ccoshfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ccoshl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ccosl: (libc)Trig Functions. * ceil: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ceilf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ceilfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ceilfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ceill: (libc)Rounding Functions. * cexp: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cexpf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cexpfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cexpfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cexpl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cfgetispeed: (libc)Line Speed. * cfgetospeed: (libc)Line Speed. * cfmakeraw: (libc)Noncanonical Input. * cfsetispeed: (libc)Line Speed. * cfsetospeed: (libc)Line Speed. * cfsetspeed: (libc)Line Speed. * chdir: (libc)Working Directory. * chmod: (libc)Setting Permissions. * chown: (libc)File Owner. * cimag: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cimagf: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cimagfN: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cimagfNx: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cimagl: (libc)Operations on Complex. * clearenv: (libc)Environment Access. * clearerr: (libc)Error Recovery. * clearerr_unlocked: (libc)Error Recovery. * clock: (libc)CPU Time. * clog10: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clog10f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clog10fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clog10fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clog10l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clog: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clogf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clogfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clogfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * clogl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * close: (libc)Opening and Closing Files. * closedir: (libc)Reading/Closing Directory. * closelog: (libc)closelog. * cnd_broadcast: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * cnd_destroy: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * cnd_init: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * cnd_signal: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * cnd_timedwait: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * cnd_wait: (libc)ISO C Condition Variables. * confstr: (libc)String Parameters. * conj: (libc)Operations on Complex. * conjf: (libc)Operations on Complex. * conjfN: (libc)Operations on Complex. * conjfNx: (libc)Operations on Complex. * conjl: (libc)Operations on Complex. * connect: (libc)Connecting. * copy_file_range: (libc)Copying File Data. * copysign: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * copysignf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * copysignfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * copysignfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * copysignl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * cos: (libc)Trig Functions. * cosf: (libc)Trig Functions. * cosfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * cosfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * cosh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * coshf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * coshfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * coshfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * coshl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * cosl: (libc)Trig Functions. * cpow: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cpowf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cpowfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cpowfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cpowl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * cproj: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cprojf: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cprojfN: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cprojfNx: (libc)Operations on Complex. * cprojl: (libc)Operations on Complex. * creal: (libc)Operations on Complex. * crealf: (libc)Operations on Complex. * crealfN: (libc)Operations on Complex. * crealfNx: (libc)Operations on Complex. * creall: (libc)Operations on Complex. * creat64: (libc)Opening and Closing Files. * creat: (libc)Opening and Closing Files. * crypt: (libc)Passphrase Storage. * crypt_r: (libc)Passphrase Storage. * csin: (libc)Trig Functions. * csinf: (libc)Trig Functions. * csinfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * csinfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * csinh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * csinhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * csinhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * csinhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * csinhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * csinl: (libc)Trig Functions. * csqrt: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * csqrtf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * csqrtfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * csqrtfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * csqrtl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ctan: (libc)Trig Functions. * ctanf: (libc)Trig Functions. * ctanfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * ctanfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * ctanh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ctanhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ctanhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ctanhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ctanhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * ctanl: (libc)Trig Functions. * ctermid: (libc)Identifying the Terminal. * ctime: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * ctime_r: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * cuserid: (libc)Who Logged In. * daddl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * dcgettext: (libc)Translation with gettext. * dcngettext: (libc)Advanced gettext functions. * ddivl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * dgettext: (libc)Translation with gettext. * difftime: (libc)Elapsed Time. * dirfd: (libc)Opening a Directory. * dirname: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * div: (libc)Integer Division. * dmull: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * dngettext: (libc)Advanced gettext functions. * drand48: (libc)SVID Random. * drand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * drem: (libc)Remainder Functions. * dremf: (libc)Remainder Functions. * dreml: (libc)Remainder Functions. * dsubl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * dup2: (libc)Duplicating Descriptors. * dup: (libc)Duplicating Descriptors. * ecvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * ecvt_r: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * endfsent: (libc)fstab. * endgrent: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * endhostent: (libc)Host Names. * endmntent: (libc)mtab. * endnetent: (libc)Networks Database. * endnetgrent: (libc)Lookup Netgroup. * endprotoent: (libc)Protocols Database. * endpwent: (libc)Scanning All Users. * endservent: (libc)Services Database. * endutent: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * endutxent: (libc)XPG Functions. * envz_add: (libc)Envz Functions. * envz_entry: (libc)Envz Functions. * envz_get: (libc)Envz Functions. * envz_merge: (libc)Envz Functions. * envz_remove: (libc)Envz Functions. * envz_strip: (libc)Envz Functions. * erand48: (libc)SVID Random. * erand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * erf: (libc)Special Functions. * erfc: (libc)Special Functions. * erfcf: (libc)Special Functions. * erfcfN: (libc)Special Functions. * erfcfNx: (libc)Special Functions. * erfcl: (libc)Special Functions. * erff: (libc)Special Functions. * erffN: (libc)Special Functions. * erffNx: (libc)Special Functions. * erfl: (libc)Special Functions. * err: (libc)Error Messages. * errno: (libc)Checking for Errors. * error: (libc)Error Messages. * error_at_line: (libc)Error Messages. * errx: (libc)Error Messages. * execl: (libc)Executing a File. * execle: (libc)Executing a File. * execlp: (libc)Executing a File. * execv: (libc)Executing a File. * execve: (libc)Executing a File. * execvp: (libc)Executing a File. * exit: (libc)Normal Termination. * exp10: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp10f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp10fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp10fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp10l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp2: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp2f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp2fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp2fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp2l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * exp: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * explicit_bzero: (libc)Erasing Sensitive Data. * expm1: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expm1f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expm1fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expm1fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * expm1l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * fMaddfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMaddfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMdivfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMdivfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMmulfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMmulfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMsubfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMsubfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxaddfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxaddfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxdivfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxdivfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxmulfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxmulfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxsubfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fMxsubfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fabs: (libc)Absolute Value. * fabsf: (libc)Absolute Value. * fabsfN: (libc)Absolute Value. * fabsfNx: (libc)Absolute Value. * fabsl: (libc)Absolute Value. * fadd: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * faddl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fchdir: (libc)Working Directory. * fchmod: (libc)Setting Permissions. * fchown: (libc)File Owner. * fclose: (libc)Closing Streams. * fcloseall: (libc)Closing Streams. * fcntl: (libc)Control Operations. * fcvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * fcvt_r: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * fdatasync: (libc)Synchronizing I/O. * fdim: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdimf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdimfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdimfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdiml: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdiv: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdivl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fdopen: (libc)Descriptors and Streams. * fdopendir: (libc)Opening a Directory. * feclearexcept: (libc)Status bit operations. * fedisableexcept: (libc)Control Functions. * feenableexcept: (libc)Control Functions. * fegetenv: (libc)Control Functions. * fegetexcept: (libc)Control Functions. * fegetexceptflag: (libc)Status bit operations. * fegetmode: (libc)Control Functions. * fegetround: (libc)Rounding. * feholdexcept: (libc)Control Functions. * feof: (libc)EOF and Errors. * feof_unlocked: (libc)EOF and Errors. * feraiseexcept: (libc)Status bit operations. * ferror: (libc)EOF and Errors. * ferror_unlocked: (libc)EOF and Errors. * fesetenv: (libc)Control Functions. * fesetexcept: (libc)Status bit operations. * fesetexceptflag: (libc)Status bit operations. * fesetmode: (libc)Control Functions. * fesetround: (libc)Rounding. * fetestexcept: (libc)Status bit operations. * fetestexceptflag: (libc)Status bit operations. * feupdateenv: (libc)Control Functions. * fflush: (libc)Flushing Buffers. * fflush_unlocked: (libc)Flushing Buffers. * fgetc: (libc)Character Input. * fgetc_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * fgetgrent: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * fgetgrent_r: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * fgetpos64: (libc)Portable Positioning. * fgetpos: (libc)Portable Positioning. * fgetpwent: (libc)Scanning All Users. * fgetpwent_r: (libc)Scanning All Users. * fgets: (libc)Line Input. * fgets_unlocked: (libc)Line Input. * fgetwc: (libc)Character Input. * fgetwc_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * fgetws: (libc)Line Input. * fgetws_unlocked: (libc)Line Input. * fileno: (libc)Descriptors and Streams. * fileno_unlocked: (libc)Descriptors and Streams. * finite: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * finitef: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * finitel: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * flockfile: (libc)Streams and Threads. * floor: (libc)Rounding Functions. * floorf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * floorfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * floorfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * floorl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fma: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmafN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmafNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmal: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmax: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxmag: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxmagf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxmagfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxmagfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmaxmagl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmemopen: (libc)String Streams. * fmin: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminmag: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminmagf: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminmagfN: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminmagfNx: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fminmagl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmod: (libc)Remainder Functions. * fmodf: (libc)Remainder Functions. * fmodfN: (libc)Remainder Functions. * fmodfNx: (libc)Remainder Functions. * fmodl: (libc)Remainder Functions. * fmtmsg: (libc)Printing Formatted Messages. * fmul: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fmull: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fnmatch: (libc)Wildcard Matching. * fopen64: (libc)Opening Streams. * fopen: (libc)Opening Streams. * fopencookie: (libc)Streams and Cookies. * fork: (libc)Creating a Process. * forkpty: (libc)Pseudo-Terminal Pairs. * fpathconf: (libc)Pathconf. * fpclassify: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * fprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * fputc: (libc)Simple Output. * fputc_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * fputs: (libc)Simple Output. * fputs_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * fputwc: (libc)Simple Output. * fputwc_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * fputws: (libc)Simple Output. * fputws_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * fread: (libc)Block Input/Output. * fread_unlocked: (libc)Block Input/Output. * free: (libc)Freeing after Malloc. * freopen64: (libc)Opening Streams. * freopen: (libc)Opening Streams. * frexp: (libc)Normalization Functions. * frexpf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * frexpfN: (libc)Normalization Functions. * frexpfNx: (libc)Normalization Functions. * frexpl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * fromfp: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpxf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpxfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpxfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fromfpxl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * fscanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * fseek: (libc)File Positioning. * fseeko64: (libc)File Positioning. * fseeko: (libc)File Positioning. * fsetpos64: (libc)Portable Positioning. * fsetpos: (libc)Portable Positioning. * fstat64: (libc)Reading Attributes. * fstat: (libc)Reading Attributes. * fsub: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fsubl: (libc)Misc FP Arithmetic. * fsync: (libc)Synchronizing I/O. * ftell: (libc)File Positioning. * ftello64: (libc)File Positioning. * ftello: (libc)File Positioning. * ftruncate64: (libc)File Size. * ftruncate: (libc)File Size. * ftrylockfile: (libc)Streams and Threads. * ftw64: (libc)Working with Directory Trees. * ftw: (libc)Working with Directory Trees. * funlockfile: (libc)Streams and Threads. * futimes: (libc)File Times. * fwide: (libc)Streams and I18N. * fwprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * fwrite: (libc)Block Input/Output. * fwrite_unlocked: (libc)Block Input/Output. * fwscanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * gamma: (libc)Special Functions. * gammaf: (libc)Special Functions. * gammal: (libc)Special Functions. * gcvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * get_avphys_pages: (libc)Query Memory Parameters. * get_current_dir_name: (libc)Working Directory. * get_nprocs: (libc)Processor Resources. * get_nprocs_conf: (libc)Processor Resources. * get_phys_pages: (libc)Query Memory Parameters. * getauxval: (libc)Auxiliary Vector. * getc: (libc)Character Input. * getc_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * getchar: (libc)Character Input. * getchar_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * getcontext: (libc)System V contexts. * getcwd: (libc)Working Directory. * getdate: (libc)General Time String Parsing. * getdate_r: (libc)General Time String Parsing. * getdelim: (libc)Line Input. * getdomainnname: (libc)Host Identification. * getegid: (libc)Reading Persona. * getentropy: (libc)Unpredictable Bytes. * getenv: (libc)Environment Access. * geteuid: (libc)Reading Persona. * getfsent: (libc)fstab. * getfsfile: (libc)fstab. * getfsspec: (libc)fstab. * getgid: (libc)Reading Persona. * getgrent: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * getgrent_r: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * getgrgid: (libc)Lookup Group. * getgrgid_r: (libc)Lookup Group. * getgrnam: (libc)Lookup Group. * getgrnam_r: (libc)Lookup Group. * getgrouplist: (libc)Setting Groups. * getgroups: (libc)Reading Persona. * gethostbyaddr: (libc)Host Names. * gethostbyaddr_r: (libc)Host Names. * gethostbyname2: (libc)Host Names. * gethostbyname2_r: (libc)Host Names. * gethostbyname: (libc)Host Names. * gethostbyname_r: (libc)Host Names. * gethostent: (libc)Host Names. * gethostid: (libc)Host Identification. * gethostname: (libc)Host Identification. * getitimer: (libc)Setting an Alarm. * getline: (libc)Line Input. * getloadavg: (libc)Processor Resources. * getlogin: (libc)Who Logged In. * getmntent: (libc)mtab. * getmntent_r: (libc)mtab. * getnetbyaddr: (libc)Networks Database. * getnetbyname: (libc)Networks Database. * getnetent: (libc)Networks Database. * getnetgrent: (libc)Lookup Netgroup. * getnetgrent_r: (libc)Lookup Netgroup. * getopt: (libc)Using Getopt. * getopt_long: (libc)Getopt Long Options. * getopt_long_only: (libc)Getopt Long Options. * getpagesize: (libc)Query Memory Parameters. * getpass: (libc)getpass. * getpayload: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * getpayloadf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * getpayloadfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * getpayloadfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * getpayloadl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * getpeername: (libc)Who is Connected. * getpgid: (libc)Process Group Functions. * getpgrp: (libc)Process Group Functions. * getpid: (libc)Process Identification. * getppid: (libc)Process Identification. * getpriority: (libc)Traditional Scheduling Functions. * getprotobyname: (libc)Protocols Database. * getprotobynumber: (libc)Protocols Database. * getprotoent: (libc)Protocols Database. * getpt: (libc)Allocation. * getpwent: (libc)Scanning All Users. * getpwent_r: (libc)Scanning All Users. * getpwnam: (libc)Lookup User. * getpwnam_r: (libc)Lookup User. * getpwuid: (libc)Lookup User. * getpwuid_r: (libc)Lookup User. * getrandom: (libc)Unpredictable Bytes. * getrlimit64: (libc)Limits on Resources. * getrlimit: (libc)Limits on Resources. * getrusage: (libc)Resource Usage. * gets: (libc)Line Input. * getservbyname: (libc)Services Database. * getservbyport: (libc)Services Database. * getservent: (libc)Services Database. * getsid: (libc)Process Group Functions. * getsockname: (libc)Reading Address. * getsockopt: (libc)Socket Option Functions. * getsubopt: (libc)Suboptions. * gettext: (libc)Translation with gettext. * gettimeofday: (libc)High-Resolution Calendar. * getuid: (libc)Reading Persona. * getumask: (libc)Setting Permissions. * getutent: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutent_r: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutid: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutid_r: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutline: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutline_r: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * getutmp: (libc)XPG Functions. * getutmpx: (libc)XPG Functions. * getutxent: (libc)XPG Functions. * getutxid: (libc)XPG Functions. * getutxline: (libc)XPG Functions. * getw: (libc)Character Input. * getwc: (libc)Character Input. * getwc_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * getwchar: (libc)Character Input. * getwchar_unlocked: (libc)Character Input. * getwd: (libc)Working Directory. * glob64: (libc)Calling Glob. * glob: (libc)Calling Glob. * globfree64: (libc)More Flags for Globbing. * globfree: (libc)More Flags for Globbing. * gmtime: (libc)Broken-down Time. * gmtime_r: (libc)Broken-down Time. * grantpt: (libc)Allocation. * gsignal: (libc)Signaling Yourself. * gtty: (libc)BSD Terminal Modes. * hasmntopt: (libc)mtab. * hcreate: (libc)Hash Search Function. * hcreate_r: (libc)Hash Search Function. * hdestroy: (libc)Hash Search Function. * hdestroy_r: (libc)Hash Search Function. * hsearch: (libc)Hash Search Function. * hsearch_r: (libc)Hash Search Function. * htonl: (libc)Byte Order. * htons: (libc)Byte Order. * hypot: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * hypotf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * hypotfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * hypotfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * hypotl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * iconv: (libc)Generic Conversion Interface. * iconv_close: (libc)Generic Conversion Interface. * iconv_open: (libc)Generic Conversion Interface. * if_freenameindex: (libc)Interface Naming. * if_indextoname: (libc)Interface Naming. * if_nameindex: (libc)Interface Naming. * if_nametoindex: (libc)Interface Naming. * ilogb: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ilogbf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ilogbfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ilogbfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * ilogbl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * imaxabs: (libc)Absolute Value. * imaxdiv: (libc)Integer Division. * in6addr_any: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * in6addr_loopback: (libc)Host Address Data Type. * index: (libc)Search Functions. * inet_addr: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_aton: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_lnaof: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_makeaddr: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_netof: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_network: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_ntoa: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_ntop: (libc)Host Address Functions. * inet_pton: (libc)Host Address Functions. * initgroups: (libc)Setting Groups. * initstate: (libc)BSD Random. * initstate_r: (libc)BSD Random. * innetgr: (libc)Netgroup Membership. * ioctl: (libc)IOCTLs. * isalnum: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isalpha: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isascii: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isatty: (libc)Is It a Terminal. * isblank: (libc)Classification of Characters. * iscanonical: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * iscntrl: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isdigit: (libc)Classification of Characters. * iseqsig: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * isfinite: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isgraph: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isgreater: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * isgreaterequal: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * isinf: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isinff: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isinfl: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isless: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * islessequal: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * islessgreater: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * islower: (libc)Classification of Characters. * isnan: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isnan: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isnanf: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isnanl: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isnormal: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isprint: (libc)Classification of Characters. * ispunct: (libc)Classification of Characters. * issignaling: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isspace: (libc)Classification of Characters. * issubnormal: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * isunordered: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * isupper: (libc)Classification of Characters. * iswalnum: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswalpha: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswblank: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswcntrl: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswctype: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswdigit: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswgraph: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswlower: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswprint: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswpunct: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswspace: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswupper: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * iswxdigit: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * isxdigit: (libc)Classification of Characters. * iszero: (libc)Floating Point Classes. * j0: (libc)Special Functions. * j0f: (libc)Special Functions. * j0fN: (libc)Special Functions. * j0fNx: (libc)Special Functions. * j0l: (libc)Special Functions. * j1: (libc)Special Functions. * j1f: (libc)Special Functions. * j1fN: (libc)Special Functions. * j1fNx: (libc)Special Functions. * j1l: (libc)Special Functions. * jn: (libc)Special Functions. * jnf: (libc)Special Functions. * jnfN: (libc)Special Functions. * jnfNx: (libc)Special Functions. * jnl: (libc)Special Functions. * jrand48: (libc)SVID Random. * jrand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * kill: (libc)Signaling Another Process. * killpg: (libc)Signaling Another Process. * l64a: (libc)Encode Binary Data. * labs: (libc)Absolute Value. * lcong48: (libc)SVID Random. * lcong48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * ldexp: (libc)Normalization Functions. * ldexpf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * ldexpfN: (libc)Normalization Functions. * ldexpfNx: (libc)Normalization Functions. * ldexpl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * ldiv: (libc)Integer Division. * lfind: (libc)Array Search Function. * lgamma: (libc)Special Functions. * lgamma_r: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammaf: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammafN: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammafN_r: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammafNx: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammafNx_r: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammaf_r: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammal: (libc)Special Functions. * lgammal_r: (libc)Special Functions. * link: (libc)Hard Links. * linkat: (libc)Hard Links. * lio_listio64: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * lio_listio: (libc)Asynchronous Reads/Writes. * listen: (libc)Listening. * llabs: (libc)Absolute Value. * lldiv: (libc)Integer Division. * llogb: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * llogbf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * llogbfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * llogbfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * llogbl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * llrint: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llrintf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llrintfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llrintfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llrintl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llround: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llroundf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llroundfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llroundfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * llroundl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * localeconv: (libc)The Lame Way to Locale Data. * localtime: (libc)Broken-down Time. * localtime_r: (libc)Broken-down Time. * log10: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log10f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log10fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log10fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log10l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log1p: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log1pf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log1pfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log1pfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log1pl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log2: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log2f: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log2fN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log2fNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log2l: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * log: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logb: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logbf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logbfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logbfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logbl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * login: (libc)Logging In and Out. * login_tty: (libc)Logging In and Out. * logl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * logout: (libc)Logging In and Out. * logwtmp: (libc)Logging In and Out. * longjmp: (libc)Non-Local Details. * lrand48: (libc)SVID Random. * lrand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * lrint: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lrintf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lrintfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lrintfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lrintl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lround: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lroundf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lroundfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lroundfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lroundl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * lsearch: (libc)Array Search Function. * lseek64: (libc)File Position Primitive. * lseek: (libc)File Position Primitive. * lstat64: (libc)Reading Attributes. * lstat: (libc)Reading Attributes. * lutimes: (libc)File Times. * madvise: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * makecontext: (libc)System V contexts. * mallinfo: (libc)Statistics of Malloc. * malloc: (libc)Basic Allocation. * mallopt: (libc)Malloc Tunable Parameters. * mblen: (libc)Non-reentrant Character Conversion. * mbrlen: (libc)Converting a Character. * mbrtowc: (libc)Converting a Character. * mbsinit: (libc)Keeping the state. * mbsnrtowcs: (libc)Converting Strings. * mbsrtowcs: (libc)Converting Strings. * mbstowcs: (libc)Non-reentrant String Conversion. * mbtowc: (libc)Non-reentrant Character Conversion. * mcheck: (libc)Heap Consistency Checking. * memalign: (libc)Aligned Memory Blocks. * memccpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * memchr: (libc)Search Functions. * memcmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * memcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * memfd_create: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * memfrob: (libc)Obfuscating Data. * memmem: (libc)Search Functions. * memmove: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * mempcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * memrchr: (libc)Search Functions. * memset: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * mkdir: (libc)Creating Directories. * mkdtemp: (libc)Temporary Files. * mkfifo: (libc)FIFO Special Files. * mknod: (libc)Making Special Files. * mkstemp: (libc)Temporary Files. * mktemp: (libc)Temporary Files. * mktime: (libc)Broken-down Time. * mlock2: (libc)Page Lock Functions. * mlock: (libc)Page Lock Functions. * mlockall: (libc)Page Lock Functions. * mmap64: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * mmap: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * modf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * modff: (libc)Rounding Functions. * modffN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * modffNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * modfl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * mount: (libc)Mount-Unmount-Remount. * mprobe: (libc)Heap Consistency Checking. * mprotect: (libc)Memory Protection. * mrand48: (libc)SVID Random. * mrand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * mremap: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * msync: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * mtrace: (libc)Tracing malloc. * mtx_destroy: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * mtx_init: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * mtx_lock: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * mtx_timedlock: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * mtx_trylock: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * mtx_unlock: (libc)ISO C Mutexes. * munlock: (libc)Page Lock Functions. * munlockall: (libc)Page Lock Functions. * munmap: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * muntrace: (libc)Tracing malloc. * nan: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nanf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nanfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nanfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nanl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nanosleep: (libc)Sleeping. * nearbyint: (libc)Rounding Functions. * nearbyintf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * nearbyintfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * nearbyintfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * nearbyintl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * nextafter: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextafterf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextafterfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextafterfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextafterl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextdown: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextdownf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextdownfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextdownfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextdownl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nexttoward: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nexttowardf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nexttowardl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextup: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextupf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextupfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextupfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nextupl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * nftw64: (libc)Working with Directory Trees. * nftw: (libc)Working with Directory Trees. * ngettext: (libc)Advanced gettext functions. * nice: (libc)Traditional Scheduling Functions. * nl_langinfo: (libc)The Elegant and Fast Way. * nrand48: (libc)SVID Random. * nrand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * ntohl: (libc)Byte Order. * ntohs: (libc)Byte Order. * ntp_adjtime: (libc)High Accuracy Clock. * ntp_gettime: (libc)High Accuracy Clock. * obstack_1grow: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_1grow_fast: (libc)Extra Fast Growing. * obstack_alignment_mask: (libc)Obstacks Data Alignment. * obstack_alloc: (libc)Allocation in an Obstack. * obstack_base: (libc)Status of an Obstack. * obstack_blank: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_blank_fast: (libc)Extra Fast Growing. * obstack_chunk_size: (libc)Obstack Chunks. * obstack_copy0: (libc)Allocation in an Obstack. * obstack_copy: (libc)Allocation in an Obstack. * obstack_finish: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_free: (libc)Freeing Obstack Objects. * obstack_grow0: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_grow: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_init: (libc)Preparing for Obstacks. * obstack_int_grow: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_int_grow_fast: (libc)Extra Fast Growing. * obstack_next_free: (libc)Status of an Obstack. * obstack_object_size: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_object_size: (libc)Status of an Obstack. * obstack_printf: (libc)Dynamic Output. * obstack_ptr_grow: (libc)Growing Objects. * obstack_ptr_grow_fast: (libc)Extra Fast Growing. * obstack_room: (libc)Extra Fast Growing. * obstack_vprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * offsetof: (libc)Structure Measurement. * on_exit: (libc)Cleanups on Exit. * open64: (libc)Opening and Closing Files. * open: (libc)Opening and Closing Files. * open_memstream: (libc)String Streams. * opendir: (libc)Opening a Directory. * openlog: (libc)openlog. * openpty: (libc)Pseudo-Terminal Pairs. * parse_printf_format: (libc)Parsing a Template String. * pathconf: (libc)Pathconf. * pause: (libc)Using Pause. * pclose: (libc)Pipe to a Subprocess. * perror: (libc)Error Messages. * pipe: (libc)Creating a Pipe. * pkey_alloc: (libc)Memory Protection. * pkey_free: (libc)Memory Protection. * pkey_get: (libc)Memory Protection. * pkey_mprotect: (libc)Memory Protection. * pkey_set: (libc)Memory Protection. * popen: (libc)Pipe to a Subprocess. * posix_fallocate64: (libc)Storage Allocation. * posix_fallocate: (libc)Storage Allocation. * posix_memalign: (libc)Aligned Memory Blocks. * pow: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * powf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * powfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * powfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * powl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * pread64: (libc)I/O Primitives. * pread: (libc)I/O Primitives. * preadv2: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * preadv64: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * preadv64v2: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * preadv: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * printf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * printf_size: (libc)Predefined Printf Handlers. * printf_size_info: (libc)Predefined Printf Handlers. * psignal: (libc)Signal Messages. * pthread_getattr_default_np: (libc)Default Thread Attributes. * pthread_getspecific: (libc)Thread-specific Data. * pthread_key_create: (libc)Thread-specific Data. * pthread_key_delete: (libc)Thread-specific Data. * pthread_setattr_default_np: (libc)Default Thread Attributes. * pthread_setspecific: (libc)Thread-specific Data. * ptsname: (libc)Allocation. * ptsname_r: (libc)Allocation. * putc: (libc)Simple Output. * putc_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * putchar: (libc)Simple Output. * putchar_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * putenv: (libc)Environment Access. * putpwent: (libc)Writing a User Entry. * puts: (libc)Simple Output. * pututline: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * pututxline: (libc)XPG Functions. * putw: (libc)Simple Output. * putwc: (libc)Simple Output. * putwc_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * putwchar: (libc)Simple Output. * putwchar_unlocked: (libc)Simple Output. * pwrite64: (libc)I/O Primitives. * pwrite: (libc)I/O Primitives. * pwritev2: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * pwritev64: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * pwritev64v2: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * pwritev: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * qecvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * qecvt_r: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * qfcvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * qfcvt_r: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * qgcvt: (libc)System V Number Conversion. * qsort: (libc)Array Sort Function. * raise: (libc)Signaling Yourself. * rand: (libc)ISO Random. * rand_r: (libc)ISO Random. * random: (libc)BSD Random. * random_r: (libc)BSD Random. * rawmemchr: (libc)Search Functions. * read: (libc)I/O Primitives. * readdir64: (libc)Reading/Closing Directory. * readdir64_r: (libc)Reading/Closing Directory. * readdir: (libc)Reading/Closing Directory. * readdir_r: (libc)Reading/Closing Directory. * readlink: (libc)Symbolic Links. * readv: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * realloc: (libc)Changing Block Size. * reallocarray: (libc)Changing Block Size. * realpath: (libc)Symbolic Links. * recv: (libc)Receiving Data. * recvfrom: (libc)Receiving Datagrams. * recvmsg: (libc)Receiving Datagrams. * regcomp: (libc)POSIX Regexp Compilation. * regerror: (libc)Regexp Cleanup. * regexec: (libc)Matching POSIX Regexps. * regfree: (libc)Regexp Cleanup. * register_printf_function: (libc)Registering New Conversions. * remainder: (libc)Remainder Functions. * remainderf: (libc)Remainder Functions. * remainderfN: (libc)Remainder Functions. * remainderfNx: (libc)Remainder Functions. * remainderl: (libc)Remainder Functions. * remove: (libc)Deleting Files. * rename: (libc)Renaming Files. * rewind: (libc)File Positioning. * rewinddir: (libc)Random Access Directory. * rindex: (libc)Search Functions. * rint: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rintf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rintfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rintfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rintl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rmdir: (libc)Deleting Files. * round: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundeven: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundevenf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundevenfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundevenfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundevenl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * roundl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * rpmatch: (libc)Yes-or-No Questions. * sbrk: (libc)Resizing the Data Segment. * scalb: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbln: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalblnf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalblnfN: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalblnfNx: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalblnl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbn: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbnf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbnfN: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbnfNx: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scalbnl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * scandir64: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * scandir: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * scanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * sched_get_priority_max: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_get_priority_min: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_getaffinity: (libc)CPU Affinity. * sched_getparam: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_getscheduler: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_rr_get_interval: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_setaffinity: (libc)CPU Affinity. * sched_setparam: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_setscheduler: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * sched_yield: (libc)Basic Scheduling Functions. * secure_getenv: (libc)Environment Access. * seed48: (libc)SVID Random. * seed48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * seekdir: (libc)Random Access Directory. * select: (libc)Waiting for I/O. * sem_close: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_destroy: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_getvalue: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_init: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_open: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_post: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_timedwait: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_trywait: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_unlink: (libc)Semaphores. * sem_wait: (libc)Semaphores. * semctl: (libc)Semaphores. * semget: (libc)Semaphores. * semop: (libc)Semaphores. * semtimedop: (libc)Semaphores. * send: (libc)Sending Data. * sendmsg: (libc)Receiving Datagrams. * sendto: (libc)Sending Datagrams. * setbuf: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * setbuffer: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * setcontext: (libc)System V contexts. * setdomainname: (libc)Host Identification. * setegid: (libc)Setting Groups. * setenv: (libc)Environment Access. * seteuid: (libc)Setting User ID. * setfsent: (libc)fstab. * setgid: (libc)Setting Groups. * setgrent: (libc)Scanning All Groups. * setgroups: (libc)Setting Groups. * sethostent: (libc)Host Names. * sethostid: (libc)Host Identification. * sethostname: (libc)Host Identification. * setitimer: (libc)Setting an Alarm. * setjmp: (libc)Non-Local Details. * setlinebuf: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * setlocale: (libc)Setting the Locale. * setlogmask: (libc)setlogmask. * setmntent: (libc)mtab. * setnetent: (libc)Networks Database. * setnetgrent: (libc)Lookup Netgroup. * setpayload: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadsig: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadsigf: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadsigfN: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadsigfNx: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpayloadsigl: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * setpgid: (libc)Process Group Functions. * setpgrp: (libc)Process Group Functions. * setpriority: (libc)Traditional Scheduling Functions. * setprotoent: (libc)Protocols Database. * setpwent: (libc)Scanning All Users. * setregid: (libc)Setting Groups. * setreuid: (libc)Setting User ID. * setrlimit64: (libc)Limits on Resources. * setrlimit: (libc)Limits on Resources. * setservent: (libc)Services Database. * setsid: (libc)Process Group Functions. * setsockopt: (libc)Socket Option Functions. * setstate: (libc)BSD Random. * setstate_r: (libc)BSD Random. * settimeofday: (libc)High-Resolution Calendar. * setuid: (libc)Setting User ID. * setutent: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * setutxent: (libc)XPG Functions. * setvbuf: (libc)Controlling Buffering. * shm_open: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * shm_unlink: (libc)Memory-mapped I/O. * shutdown: (libc)Closing a Socket. * sigaction: (libc)Advanced Signal Handling. * sigaddset: (libc)Signal Sets. * sigaltstack: (libc)Signal Stack. * sigblock: (libc)BSD Signal Handling. * sigdelset: (libc)Signal Sets. * sigemptyset: (libc)Signal Sets. * sigfillset: (libc)Signal Sets. * siginterrupt: (libc)BSD Signal Handling. * sigismember: (libc)Signal Sets. * siglongjmp: (libc)Non-Local Exits and Signals. * sigmask: (libc)BSD Signal Handling. * signal: (libc)Basic Signal Handling. * signbit: (libc)FP Bit Twiddling. * significand: (libc)Normalization Functions. * significandf: (libc)Normalization Functions. * significandl: (libc)Normalization Functions. * sigpause: (libc)BSD Signal Handling. * sigpending: (libc)Checking for Pending Signals. * sigprocmask: (libc)Process Signal Mask. * sigsetjmp: (libc)Non-Local Exits and Signals. * sigsetmask: (libc)BSD Signal Handling. * sigstack: (libc)Signal Stack. * sigsuspend: (libc)Sigsuspend. * sin: (libc)Trig Functions. * sincos: (libc)Trig Functions. * sincosf: (libc)Trig Functions. * sincosfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * sincosfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * sincosl: (libc)Trig Functions. * sinf: (libc)Trig Functions. * sinfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * sinfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * sinh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * sinhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * sinhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * sinhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * sinhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * sinl: (libc)Trig Functions. * sleep: (libc)Sleeping. * snprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * socket: (libc)Creating a Socket. * socketpair: (libc)Socket Pairs. * sprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * sqrt: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * sqrtf: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * sqrtfN: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * sqrtfNx: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * sqrtl: (libc)Exponents and Logarithms. * srand48: (libc)SVID Random. * srand48_r: (libc)SVID Random. * srand: (libc)ISO Random. * srandom: (libc)BSD Random. * srandom_r: (libc)BSD Random. * sscanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * ssignal: (libc)Basic Signal Handling. * stat64: (libc)Reading Attributes. * stat: (libc)Reading Attributes. * stime: (libc)Simple Calendar Time. * stpcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * stpncpy: (libc)Truncating Strings. * strcasecmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * strcasestr: (libc)Search Functions. * strcat: (libc)Concatenating Strings. * strchr: (libc)Search Functions. * strchrnul: (libc)Search Functions. * strcmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * strcoll: (libc)Collation Functions. * strcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * strcspn: (libc)Search Functions. * strdup: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * strdupa: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * strerror: (libc)Error Messages. * strerror_r: (libc)Error Messages. * strfmon: (libc)Formatting Numbers. * strfromd: (libc)Printing of Floats. * strfromf: (libc)Printing of Floats. * strfromfN: (libc)Printing of Floats. * strfromfNx: (libc)Printing of Floats. * strfroml: (libc)Printing of Floats. * strfry: (libc)Shuffling Bytes. * strftime: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * strlen: (libc)String Length. * strncasecmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * strncat: (libc)Truncating Strings. * strncmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * strncpy: (libc)Truncating Strings. * strndup: (libc)Truncating Strings. * strndupa: (libc)Truncating Strings. * strnlen: (libc)String Length. * strpbrk: (libc)Search Functions. * strptime: (libc)Low-Level Time String Parsing. * strrchr: (libc)Search Functions. * strsep: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * strsignal: (libc)Signal Messages. * strspn: (libc)Search Functions. * strstr: (libc)Search Functions. * strtod: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * strtof: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * strtofN: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * strtofNx: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * strtoimax: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtok: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * strtok_r: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * strtol: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtold: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * strtoll: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtoq: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtoul: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtoull: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtoumax: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strtouq: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * strverscmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * strxfrm: (libc)Collation Functions. * stty: (libc)BSD Terminal Modes. * swapcontext: (libc)System V contexts. * swprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * swscanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * symlink: (libc)Symbolic Links. * sync: (libc)Synchronizing I/O. * syscall: (libc)System Calls. * sysconf: (libc)Sysconf Definition. * sysctl: (libc)System Parameters. * syslog: (libc)syslog; vsyslog. * system: (libc)Running a Command. * sysv_signal: (libc)Basic Signal Handling. * tan: (libc)Trig Functions. * tanf: (libc)Trig Functions. * tanfN: (libc)Trig Functions. * tanfNx: (libc)Trig Functions. * tanh: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * tanhf: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * tanhfN: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * tanhfNx: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * tanhl: (libc)Hyperbolic Functions. * tanl: (libc)Trig Functions. * tcdrain: (libc)Line Control. * tcflow: (libc)Line Control. * tcflush: (libc)Line Control. * tcgetattr: (libc)Mode Functions. * tcgetpgrp: (libc)Terminal Access Functions. * tcgetsid: (libc)Terminal Access Functions. * tcsendbreak: (libc)Line Control. * tcsetattr: (libc)Mode Functions. * tcsetpgrp: (libc)Terminal Access Functions. * tdelete: (libc)Tree Search Function. * tdestroy: (libc)Tree Search Function. * telldir: (libc)Random Access Directory. * tempnam: (libc)Temporary Files. * textdomain: (libc)Locating gettext catalog. * tfind: (libc)Tree Search Function. * tgamma: (libc)Special Functions. * tgammaf: (libc)Special Functions. * tgammafN: (libc)Special Functions. * tgammafNx: (libc)Special Functions. * tgammal: (libc)Special Functions. * thrd_create: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_current: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_detach: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_equal: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_exit: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_join: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_sleep: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * thrd_yield: (libc)ISO C Thread Management. * time: (libc)Simple Calendar Time. * timegm: (libc)Broken-down Time. * timelocal: (libc)Broken-down Time. * times: (libc)Processor Time. * tmpfile64: (libc)Temporary Files. * tmpfile: (libc)Temporary Files. * tmpnam: (libc)Temporary Files. * tmpnam_r: (libc)Temporary Files. * toascii: (libc)Case Conversion. * tolower: (libc)Case Conversion. * totalorder: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalorderf: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalorderfN: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalorderfNx: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalorderl: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalordermag: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalordermagf: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalordermagfN: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalordermagfNx: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * totalordermagl: (libc)FP Comparison Functions. * toupper: (libc)Case Conversion. * towctrans: (libc)Wide Character Case Conversion. * towlower: (libc)Wide Character Case Conversion. * towupper: (libc)Wide Character Case Conversion. * trunc: (libc)Rounding Functions. * truncate64: (libc)File Size. * truncate: (libc)File Size. * truncf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * truncfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * truncfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * truncl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * tsearch: (libc)Tree Search Function. * tss_create: (libc)ISO C Thread-local Storage. * tss_delete: (libc)ISO C Thread-local Storage. * tss_get: (libc)ISO C Thread-local Storage. * tss_set: (libc)ISO C Thread-local Storage. * ttyname: (libc)Is It a Terminal. * ttyname_r: (libc)Is It a Terminal. * twalk: (libc)Tree Search Function. * tzset: (libc)Time Zone Functions. * ufromfp: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpxf: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpxfN: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpxfNx: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ufromfpxl: (libc)Rounding Functions. * ulimit: (libc)Limits on Resources. * umask: (libc)Setting Permissions. * umount2: (libc)Mount-Unmount-Remount. * umount: (libc)Mount-Unmount-Remount. * uname: (libc)Platform Type. * ungetc: (libc)How Unread. * ungetwc: (libc)How Unread. * unlink: (libc)Deleting Files. * unlockpt: (libc)Allocation. * unsetenv: (libc)Environment Access. * updwtmp: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * utime: (libc)File Times. * utimes: (libc)File Times. * utmpname: (libc)Manipulating the Database. * utmpxname: (libc)XPG Functions. * va_arg: (libc)Argument Macros. * va_copy: (libc)Argument Macros. * va_end: (libc)Argument Macros. * va_start: (libc)Argument Macros. * valloc: (libc)Aligned Memory Blocks. * vasprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * verr: (libc)Error Messages. * verrx: (libc)Error Messages. * versionsort64: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * versionsort: (libc)Scanning Directory Content. * vfork: (libc)Creating a Process. * vfprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vfscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * vfwprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vfwscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * vlimit: (libc)Limits on Resources. * vprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * vsnprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vsprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vsscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * vswprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vswscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * vsyslog: (libc)syslog; vsyslog. * vtimes: (libc)Resource Usage. * vwarn: (libc)Error Messages. * vwarnx: (libc)Error Messages. * vwprintf: (libc)Variable Arguments Output. * vwscanf: (libc)Variable Arguments Input. * wait3: (libc)BSD Wait Functions. * wait4: (libc)Process Completion. * wait: (libc)Process Completion. * waitpid: (libc)Process Completion. * warn: (libc)Error Messages. * warnx: (libc)Error Messages. * wcpcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wcpncpy: (libc)Truncating Strings. * wcrtomb: (libc)Converting a Character. * wcscasecmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * wcscat: (libc)Concatenating Strings. * wcschr: (libc)Search Functions. * wcschrnul: (libc)Search Functions. * wcscmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * wcscoll: (libc)Collation Functions. * wcscpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wcscspn: (libc)Search Functions. * wcsdup: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wcsftime: (libc)Formatting Calendar Time. * wcslen: (libc)String Length. * wcsncasecmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * wcsncat: (libc)Truncating Strings. * wcsncmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * wcsncpy: (libc)Truncating Strings. * wcsnlen: (libc)String Length. * wcsnrtombs: (libc)Converting Strings. * wcspbrk: (libc)Search Functions. * wcsrchr: (libc)Search Functions. * wcsrtombs: (libc)Converting Strings. * wcsspn: (libc)Search Functions. * wcsstr: (libc)Search Functions. * wcstod: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * wcstof: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * wcstofN: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * wcstofNx: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * wcstoimax: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstok: (libc)Finding Tokens in a String. * wcstol: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstold: (libc)Parsing of Floats. * wcstoll: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstombs: (libc)Non-reentrant String Conversion. * wcstoq: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstoul: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstoull: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstoumax: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcstouq: (libc)Parsing of Integers. * wcswcs: (libc)Search Functions. * wcsxfrm: (libc)Collation Functions. * wctob: (libc)Converting a Character. * wctomb: (libc)Non-reentrant Character Conversion. * wctrans: (libc)Wide Character Case Conversion. * wctype: (libc)Classification of Wide Characters. * wmemchr: (libc)Search Functions. * wmemcmp: (libc)String/Array Comparison. * wmemcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wmemmove: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wmempcpy: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wmemset: (libc)Copying Strings and Arrays. * wordexp: (libc)Calling Wordexp. * wordfree: (libc)Calling Wordexp. * wprintf: (libc)Formatted Output Functions. * write: (libc)I/O Primitives. * writev: (libc)Scatter-Gather. * wscanf: (libc)Formatted Input Functions. * y0: (libc)Special Functions. * y0f: (libc)Special Functions. * y0fN: (libc)Special Functions. * y0fNx: (libc)Special Functions. * y0l: (libc)Special Functions. * y1: (libc)Special Functions. * y1f: (libc)Special Functions. * y1fN: (libc)Special Functions. * y1fNx: (libc)Special Functions. * y1l: (libc)Special Functions. * yn: (libc)Special Functions. * ynf: (libc)Special Functions. * ynfN: (libc)Special Functions. * ynfNx: (libc)Special Functions. * ynl: (libc)Special Functions. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY  File: libc.info, Node: The gencat program, Next: Common Usage, Prev: The message catalog files, Up: Message catalogs a la X/Open 8.1.3 Generate Message Catalogs files ------------------------------------- The ‘gencat’ program is specified in the X/Open standard and the GNU implementation follows this specification and so processes all correctly formed input files. Additionally some extension are implemented which help to work in a more reasonable way with the ‘catgets’ functions. The ‘gencat’ program can be invoked in two ways: `gencat [OPTION ...] [OUTPUT-FILE [INPUT-FILE ...]]` This is the interface defined in the X/Open standard. If no INPUT-FILE parameter is given, input will be read from standard input. Multiple input files will be read as if they were concatenated. If OUTPUT-FILE is also missing, the output will be written to standard output. To provide the interface one is used to from other programs a second interface is provided. `gencat [OPTION ...] -o OUTPUT-FILE [INPUT-FILE ...]` The option ‘-o’ is used to specify the output file and all file arguments are used as input files. Beside this one can use ‘-’ or ‘/dev/stdin’ for INPUT-FILE to denote the standard input. Corresponding one can use ‘-’ and ‘/dev/stdout’ for OUTPUT-FILE to denote standard output. Using ‘-’ as a file name is allowed in X/Open while using the device names is a GNU extension. The ‘gencat’ program works by concatenating all input files and then *merging* the resulting collection of message sets with a possibly existing output file. This is done by removing all messages with set/message number tuples matching any of the generated messages from the output file and then adding all the new messages. To regenerate a catalog file while ignoring the old contents therefore requires removing the output file if it exists. If the output is written to standard output no merging takes place. The following table shows the options understood by the ‘gencat’ program. The X/Open standard does not specify any options for the program so all of these are GNU extensions. ‘-V’ ‘--version’ Print the version information and exit. ‘-h’ ‘--help’ Print a usage message listing all available options, then exit successfully. ‘--new’ Do not merge the new messages from the input files with the old content of the output file. The old content of the output file is discarded. ‘-H’ ‘--header=name’ This option is used to emit the symbolic names given to sets and messages in the input files for use in the program. Details about how to use this are given in the next section. The NAME parameter to this option specifies the name of the output file. It will contain a number of C preprocessor ‘#define’s to associate a name with a number. Please note that the generated file only contains the symbols from the input files. If the output is merged with the previous content of the output file the possibly existing symbols from the file(s) which generated the old output files are not in the generated header file.  File: libc.info, Node: Common Usage, Prev: The gencat program, Up: Message catalogs a la X/Open 8.1.4 How to use the ‘catgets’ interface ---------------------------------------- The ‘catgets’ functions can be used in two different ways. By following slavishly the X/Open specs and not relying on the extension and by using the GNU extensions. We will take a look at the former method first to understand the benefits of extensions. 8.1.4.1 Not using symbolic names ................................ Since the X/Open format of the message catalog files does not allow symbol names we have to work with numbers all the time. When we start writing a program we have to replace all appearances of translatable strings with something like catgets (catdesc, set, msg, "string") CATGETS is retrieved from a call to ‘catopen’ which is normally done once at the program start. The ‘"string"’ is the string we want to translate. The problems start with the set and message numbers. In a bigger program several programmers usually work at the same time on the program and so coordinating the number allocation is crucial. Though no two different strings must be indexed by the same tuple of numbers it is highly desirable to reuse the numbers for equal strings with equal translations (please note that there might be strings which are equal in one language but have different translations due to difference contexts). The allocation process can be relaxed a bit by different set numbers for different parts of the program. So the number of developers who have to coordinate the allocation can be reduced. But still lists must be keep track of the allocation and errors can easily happen. These errors cannot be discovered by the compiler or the ‘catgets’ functions. Only the user of the program might see wrong messages printed. In the worst cases the messages are so irritating that they cannot be recognized as wrong. Think about the translations for ‘"true"’ and ‘"false"’ being exchanged. This could result in a disaster. 8.1.4.2 Using symbolic names ............................ The problems mentioned in the last section derive from the fact that: 1. the numbers are allocated once and due to the possibly frequent use of them it is difficult to change a number later. 2. the numbers do not allow guessing anything about the string and therefore collisions can easily happen. By constantly using symbolic names and by providing a method which maps the string content to a symbolic name (however this will happen) one can prevent both problems above. The cost of this is that the programmer has to write a complete message catalog file while s/he is writing the program itself. This is necessary since the symbolic names must be mapped to numbers before the program sources can be compiled. In the last section it was described how to generate a header containing the mapping of the names. E.g., for the example message file given in the last section we could call the ‘gencat’ program as follows (assume ‘ex.msg’ contains the sources). gencat -H ex.h -o ex.cat ex.msg This generates a header file with the following content: #define SetTwoSet 0x2 /* ex.msg:8 */ #define SetOneSet 0x1 /* ex.msg:4 */ #define SetOnetwo 0x2 /* ex.msg:6 */ As can be seen the various symbols given in the source file are mangled to generate unique identifiers and these identifiers get numbers assigned. Reading the source file and knowing about the rules will allow to predict the content of the header file (it is deterministic) but this is not necessary. The ‘gencat’ program can take care for everything. All the programmer has to do is to put the generated header file in the dependency list of the source files of her/his project and add a rule to regenerate the header if any of the input files change. One word about the symbol mangling. Every symbol consists of two parts: the name of the message set plus the name of the message or the special string ‘Set’. So ‘SetOnetwo’ means this macro can be used to access the translation with identifier ‘two’ in the message set ‘SetOne’. The other names denote the names of the message sets. The special string ‘Set’ is used in the place of the message identifier. If in the code the second string of the set ‘SetOne’ is used the C code should look like this: catgets (catdesc, SetOneSet, SetOnetwo, " Message with ID \"two\", which gets the value 2 assigned") Writing the function this way will allow to change the message number and even the set number without requiring any change in the C source code. (The text of the string is normally not the same; this is only for this example.) 8.1.4.3 How does to this allow to develop ......................................... To illustrate the usual way to work with the symbolic version numbers here is a little example. Assume we want to write the very complex and famous greeting program. We start by writing the code as usual: #include int main (void) { printf ("Hello, world!\n"); return 0; } Now we want to internationalize the message and therefore replace the message with whatever the user wants. #include #include #include "msgnrs.h" int main (void) { nl_catd catdesc = catopen ("hello.cat", NL_CAT_LOCALE); printf (catgets (catdesc, SetMainSet, SetMainHello, "Hello, world!\n")); catclose (catdesc); return 0; } We see how the catalog object is opened and the returned descriptor used in the other function calls. It is not really necessary to check for failure of any of the functions since even in these situations the functions will behave reasonable. They simply will be return a translation. What remains unspecified here are the constants ‘SetMainSet’ and ‘SetMainHello’. These are the symbolic names describing the message. To get the actual definitions which match the information in the catalog file we have to create the message catalog source file and process it using the ‘gencat’ program. $ Messages for the famous greeting program. $quote " $set Main Hello "Hallo, Welt!\n" Now we can start building the program (assume the message catalog source file is named ‘hello.msg’ and the program source file ‘hello.c’): % gencat -H msgnrs.h -o hello.cat hello.msg % cat msgnrs.h #define MainSet 0x1 /* hello.msg:4 */ #define MainHello 0x1 /* hello.msg:5 */ % gcc -o hello hello.c -I. % cp hello.cat /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES % echo $LC_ALL de % ./hello Hallo, Welt! % The call of the ‘gencat’ program creates the missing header file ‘msgnrs.h’ as well as the message catalog binary. The former is used in the compilation of ‘hello.c’ while the later is placed in a directory in which the ‘catopen’ function will try to locate it. Please check the ‘LC_ALL’ environment variable and the default path for ‘catopen’ presented in the description above.  File: libc.info, Node: The Uniforum approach, Prev: Message catalogs a la X/Open, Up: Message Translation 8.2 The Uniforum approach to Message Translation ================================================ Sun Microsystems tried to standardize a different approach to message translation in the Uniforum group. There never was a real standard defined but still the interface was used in Sun’s operating systems. Since this approach fits better in the development process of free software it is also used throughout the GNU project and the GNU ‘gettext’ package provides support for this outside the GNU C Library. The code of the ‘libintl’ from GNU ‘gettext’ is the same as the code in the GNU C Library. So the documentation in the GNU ‘gettext’ manual is also valid for the functionality here. The following text will describe the library functions in detail. But the numerous helper programs are not described in this manual. Instead people should read the GNU ‘gettext’ manual (*note GNU gettext utilities: (gettext)Top.). We will only give a short overview. Though the ‘catgets’ functions are available by default on more systems the ‘gettext’ interface is at least as portable as the former. The GNU ‘gettext’ package can be used wherever the functions are not available. * Menu: * Message catalogs with gettext:: The ‘gettext’ family of functions. * Helper programs for gettext:: Programs to handle message catalogs for ‘gettext’.  File: libc.info, Node: Message catalogs with gettext, Next: Helper programs for gettext, Up: The Uniforum approach 8.2.1 The ‘gettext’ family of functions --------------------------------------- The paradigms underlying the ‘gettext’ approach to message translations is different from that of the ‘catgets’ functions the basic functionally is equivalent. There are functions of the following categories: * Menu: * Translation with gettext:: What has to be done to translate a message. * Locating gettext catalog:: How to determine which catalog to be used. * Advanced gettext functions:: Additional functions for more complicated situations. * Charset conversion in gettext:: How to specify the output character set ‘gettext’ uses. * GUI program problems:: How to use ‘gettext’ in GUI programs. * Using gettextized software:: The possibilities of the user to influence the way ‘gettext’ works.  File: libc.info, Node: Translation with gettext, Next: Locating gettext catalog, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.1 What has to be done to translate a message? ................................................... The ‘gettext’ functions have a very simple interface. The most basic function just takes the string which shall be translated as the argument and it returns the translation. This is fundamentally different from the ‘catgets’ approach where an extra key is necessary and the original string is only used for the error case. If the string which has to be translated is the only argument this of course means the string itself is the key. I.e., the translation will be selected based on the original string. The message catalogs must therefore contain the original strings plus one translation for any such string. The task of the ‘gettext’ function is to compare the argument string with the available strings in the catalog and return the appropriate translation. Of course this process is optimized so that this process is not more expensive than an access using an atomic key like in ‘catgets’. The ‘gettext’ approach has some advantages but also some disadvantages. Please see the GNU ‘gettext’ manual for a detailed discussion of the pros and cons. All the definitions and declarations for ‘gettext’ can be found in the ‘libintl.h’ header file. On systems where these functions are not part of the C library they can be found in a separate library named ‘libintl.a’ (or accordingly different for shared libraries). -- Function: char * gettext (const char *MSGID) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘gettext’ function searches the currently selected message catalogs for a string which is equal to MSGID. If there is such a string available it is returned. Otherwise the argument string MSGID is returned. Please note that although the return value is ‘char *’ the returned string must not be changed. This broken type results from the history of the function and does not reflect the way the function should be used. Please note that above we wrote “message catalogs” (plural). This is a specialty of the GNU implementation of these functions and we will say more about this when we talk about the ways message catalogs are selected (*note Locating gettext catalog::). The ‘gettext’ function does not modify the value of the global ERRNO variable. This is necessary to make it possible to write something like printf (gettext ("Operation failed: %m\n")); Here the ERRNO value is used in the ‘printf’ function while processing the ‘%m’ format element and if the ‘gettext’ function would change this value (it is called before ‘printf’ is called) we would get a wrong message. So there is no easy way to detect a missing message catalog besides comparing the argument string with the result. But it is normally the task of the user to react on missing catalogs. The program cannot guess when a message catalog is really necessary since for a user who speaks the language the program was developed in, the message does not need any translation. The remaining two functions to access the message catalog add some functionality to select a message catalog which is not the default one. This is important if parts of the program are developed independently. Every part can have its own message catalog and all of them can be used at the same time. The C library itself is an example: internally it uses the ‘gettext’ functions but since it must not depend on a currently selected default message catalog it must specify all ambiguous information. -- Function: char * dgettext (const char *DOMAINNAME, const char *MSGID) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘dgettext’ function acts just like the ‘gettext’ function. It only takes an additional first argument DOMAINNAME which guides the selection of the message catalogs which are searched for the translation. If the DOMAINNAME parameter is the null pointer the ‘dgettext’ function is exactly equivalent to ‘gettext’ since the default value for the domain name is used. As for ‘gettext’ the return value type is ‘char *’ which is an anachronism. The returned string must never be modified. -- Function: char * dcgettext (const char *DOMAINNAME, const char *MSGID, int CATEGORY) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘dcgettext’ adds another argument to those which ‘dgettext’ takes. This argument CATEGORY specifies the last piece of information needed to localize the message catalog. I.e., the domain name and the locale category exactly specify which message catalog has to be used (relative to a given directory, see below). The ‘dgettext’ function can be expressed in terms of ‘dcgettext’ by using dcgettext (domain, string, LC_MESSAGES) instead of dgettext (domain, string) This also shows which values are expected for the third parameter. One has to use the available selectors for the categories available in ‘locale.h’. Normally the available values are ‘LC_CTYPE’, ‘LC_COLLATE’, ‘LC_MESSAGES’, ‘LC_MONETARY’, ‘LC_NUMERIC’, and ‘LC_TIME’. Please note that ‘LC_ALL’ must not be used and even though the names might suggest this, there is no relation to the environment variable of this name. The ‘dcgettext’ function is only implemented for compatibility with other systems which have ‘gettext’ functions. There is not really any situation where it is necessary (or useful) to use a different value than ‘LC_MESSAGES’ for the CATEGORY parameter. We are dealing with messages here and any other choice can only be irritating. As for ‘gettext’ the return value type is ‘char *’ which is an anachronism. The returned string must never be modified. When using the three functions above in a program it is a frequent case that the MSGID argument is a constant string. So it is worthwhile to optimize this case. Thinking shortly about this one will realize that as long as no new message catalog is loaded the translation of a message will not change. This optimization is actually implemented by the ‘gettext’, ‘dgettext’ and ‘dcgettext’ functions.  File: libc.info, Node: Locating gettext catalog, Next: Advanced gettext functions, Prev: Translation with gettext, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.2 How to determine which catalog to be used ................................................. The functions to retrieve the translations for a given message have a remarkable simple interface. But to provide the user of the program still the opportunity to select exactly the translation s/he wants and also to provide the programmer the possibility to influence the way to locate the search for catalogs files there is a quite complicated underlying mechanism which controls all this. The code is complicated the use is easy. Basically we have two different tasks to perform which can also be performed by the ‘catgets’ functions: 1. Locate the set of message catalogs. There are a number of files for different languages which all belong to the package. Usually they are all stored in the filesystem below a certain directory. There can be arbitrarily many packages installed and they can follow different guidelines for the placement of their files. 2. Relative to the location specified by the package the actual translation files must be searched, based on the wishes of the user. I.e., for each language the user selects the program should be able to locate the appropriate file. This is the functionality required by the specifications for ‘gettext’ and this is also what the ‘catgets’ functions are able to do. But there are some problems unresolved: • The language to be used can be specified in several different ways. There is no generally accepted standard for this and the user always expects the program to understand what s/he means. E.g., to select the German translation one could write ‘de’, ‘german’, or ‘deutsch’ and the program should always react the same. • Sometimes the specification of the user is too detailed. If s/he, e.g., specifies ‘de_DE.ISO-8859-1’ which means German, spoken in Germany, coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set there is the possibility that a message catalog matching this exactly is not available. But there could be a catalog matching ‘de’ and if the character set used on the machine is always ISO 8859-1 there is no reason why this later message catalog should not be used. (We call this “message inheritance”.) • If a catalog for a wanted language is not available it is not always the second best choice to fall back on the language of the developer and simply not translate any message. Instead a user might be better able to read the messages in another language and so the user of the program should be able to define a precedence order of languages. We can divide the configuration actions in two parts: the one is performed by the programmer, the other by the user. We will start with the functions the programmer can use since the user configuration will be based on this. As the functions described in the last sections already mention separate sets of messages can be selected by a “domain name”. This is a simple string which should be unique for each program part that uses a separate domain. It is possible to use in one program arbitrarily many domains at the same time. E.g., the GNU C Library itself uses a domain named ‘libc’ while the program using the C Library could use a domain named ‘foo’. The important point is that at any time exactly one domain is active. This is controlled with the following function. -- Function: char * textdomain (const char *DOMAINNAME) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe lock heap | AC-Unsafe lock mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘textdomain’ function sets the default domain, which is used in all future ‘gettext’ calls, to DOMAINNAME. Please note that ‘dgettext’ and ‘dcgettext’ calls are not influenced if the DOMAINNAME parameter of these functions is not the null pointer. Before the first call to ‘textdomain’ the default domain is ‘messages’. This is the name specified in the specification of the ‘gettext’ API. This name is as good as any other name. No program should ever really use a domain with this name since this can only lead to problems. The function returns the value which is from now on taken as the default domain. If the system went out of memory the returned value is ‘NULL’ and the global variable ERRNO is set to ‘ENOMEM’. Despite the return value type being ‘char *’ the return string must not be changed. It is allocated internally by the ‘textdomain’ function. If the DOMAINNAME parameter is the null pointer no new default domain is set. Instead the currently selected default domain is returned. If the DOMAINNAME parameter is the empty string the default domain is reset to its initial value, the domain with the name ‘messages’. This possibility is questionable to use since the domain ‘messages’ really never should be used. -- Function: char * bindtextdomain (const char *DOMAINNAME, const char *DIRNAME) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘bindtextdomain’ function can be used to specify the directory which contains the message catalogs for domain DOMAINNAME for the different languages. To be correct, this is the directory where the hierarchy of directories is expected. Details are explained below. For the programmer it is important to note that the translations which come with the program have to be placed in a directory hierarchy starting at, say, ‘/foo/bar’. Then the program should make a ‘bindtextdomain’ call to bind the domain for the current program to this directory. So it is made sure the catalogs are found. A correctly running program does not depend on the user setting an environment variable. The ‘bindtextdomain’ function can be used several times and if the DOMAINNAME argument is different the previously bound domains will not be overwritten. If the program which wish to use ‘bindtextdomain’ at some point of time use the ‘chdir’ function to change the current working directory it is important that the DIRNAME strings ought to be an absolute pathname. Otherwise the addressed directory might vary with the time. If the DIRNAME parameter is the null pointer ‘bindtextdomain’ returns the currently selected directory for the domain with the name DOMAINNAME. The ‘bindtextdomain’ function returns a pointer to a string containing the name of the selected directory name. The string is allocated internally in the function and must not be changed by the user. If the system went out of core during the execution of ‘bindtextdomain’ the return value is ‘NULL’ and the global variable ERRNO is set accordingly.  File: libc.info, Node: Advanced gettext functions, Next: Charset conversion in gettext, Prev: Locating gettext catalog, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.3 Additional functions for more complicated situations ............................................................ The functions of the ‘gettext’ family described so far (and all the ‘catgets’ functions as well) have one problem in the real world which has been neglected completely in all existing approaches. What is meant here is the handling of plural forms. Looking through Unix source code before the time anybody thought about internationalization (and, sadly, even afterwards) one can often find code similar to the following: printf ("%d file%s deleted", n, n == 1 ? "" : "s"); After the first complaints from people internationalizing the code people either completely avoided formulations like this or used strings like ‘"file(s)"’. Both look unnatural and should be avoided. First tries to solve the problem correctly looked like this: if (n == 1) printf ("%d file deleted", n); else printf ("%d files deleted", n); But this does not solve the problem. It helps languages where the plural form of a noun is not simply constructed by adding an ‘s’ but that is all. Once again people fell into the trap of believing the rules their language uses are universal. But the handling of plural forms differs widely between the language families. There are two things we can differ between (and even inside language families); • The form how plural forms are build differs. This is a problem with language which have many irregularities. German, for instance, is a drastic case. Though English and German are part of the same language family (Germanic), the almost regular forming of plural noun forms (appending an ‘s’) is hardly found in German. • The number of plural forms differ. This is somewhat surprising for those who only have experiences with Romanic and Germanic languages since here the number is the same (there are two). But other language families have only one form or many forms. More information on this in an extra section. The consequence of this is that application writers should not try to solve the problem in their code. This would be localization since it is only usable for certain, hardcoded language environments. Instead the extended ‘gettext’ interface should be used. These extra functions are taking instead of the one key string two strings and a numerical argument. The idea behind this is that using the numerical argument and the first string as a key, the implementation can select using rules specified by the translator the right plural form. The two string arguments then will be used to provide a return value in case no message catalog is found (similar to the normal ‘gettext’ behavior). In this case the rules for Germanic language are used and it is assumed that the first string argument is the singular form, the second the plural form. This has the consequence that programs without language catalogs can display the correct strings only if the program itself is written using a Germanic language. This is a limitation but since the GNU C Library (as well as the GNU ‘gettext’ package) is written as part of the GNU package and the coding standards for the GNU project require programs to be written in English, this solution nevertheless fulfills its purpose. -- Function: char * ngettext (const char *MSGID1, const char *MSGID2, unsigned long int N) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘ngettext’ function is similar to the ‘gettext’ function as it finds the message catalogs in the same way. But it takes two extra arguments. The MSGID1 parameter must contain the singular form of the string to be converted. It is also used as the key for the search in the catalog. The MSGID2 parameter is the plural form. The parameter N is used to determine the plural form. If no message catalog is found MSGID1 is returned if ‘n == 1’, otherwise ‘msgid2’. An example for the use of this function is: printf (ngettext ("%d file removed", "%d files removed", n), n); Please note that the numeric value N has to be passed to the ‘printf’ function as well. It is not sufficient to pass it only to ‘ngettext’. -- Function: char * dngettext (const char *DOMAIN, const char *MSGID1, const char *MSGID2, unsigned long int N) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘dngettext’ is similar to the ‘dgettext’ function in the way the message catalog is selected. The difference is that it takes two extra parameters to provide the correct plural form. These two parameters are handled in the same way ‘ngettext’ handles them. -- Function: char * dcngettext (const char *DOMAIN, const char *MSGID1, const char *MSGID2, unsigned long int N, int CATEGORY) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘dcngettext’ is similar to the ‘dcgettext’ function in the way the message catalog is selected. The difference is that it takes two extra parameters to provide the correct plural form. These two parameters are handled in the same way ‘ngettext’ handles them. The problem of plural forms ........................... A description of the problem can be found at the beginning of the last section. Now there is the question how to solve it. Without the input of linguists (which was not available) it was not possible to determine whether there are only a few different forms in which plural forms are formed or whether the number can increase with every new supported language. Therefore the solution implemented is to allow the translator to specify the rules of how to select the plural form. Since the formula varies with every language this is the only viable solution except for hardcoding the information in the code (which still would require the possibility of extensions to not prevent the use of new languages). The details are explained in the GNU ‘gettext’ manual. Here only a bit of information is provided. The information about the plural form selection has to be stored in the header entry (the one with the empty ‘msgid’ string). It looks like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n == 1 ? 0 : 1; The ‘nplurals’ value must be a decimal number which specifies how many different plural forms exist for this language. The string following ‘plural’ is an expression using the C language syntax. Exceptions are that no negative numbers are allowed, numbers must be decimal, and the only variable allowed is ‘n’. This expression will be evaluated whenever one of the functions ‘ngettext’, ‘dngettext’, or ‘dcngettext’ is called. The numeric value passed to these functions is then substituted for all uses of the variable ‘n’ in the expression. The resulting value then must be greater or equal to zero and smaller than the value given as the value of ‘nplurals’. The following rules are known at this point. The language with families are listed. But this does not necessarily mean the information can be generalized for the whole family (as can be easily seen in the table below).(1) Only one form: Some languages only require one single form. There is no distinction between the singular and plural form. An appropriate header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0; Languages with this property include: Finno-Ugric family Hungarian Asian family Japanese, Korean Turkic/Altaic family Turkish Two forms, singular used for one only This is the form used in most existing programs since it is what English uses. A header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1; (Note: this uses the feature of C expressions that boolean expressions have to value zero or one.) Languages with this property include: Germanic family Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish Finno-Ugric family Estonian, Finnish Latin/Greek family Greek Semitic family Hebrew Romance family Italian, Portuguese, Spanish Artificial Esperanto Two forms, singular used for zero and one Exceptional case in the language family. The header entry would be: Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n>1; Languages with this property include: Romanic family French, Brazilian Portuguese Three forms, special case for zero The header entry would be: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n != 0 ? 1 : 2; Languages with this property include: Baltic family Latvian Three forms, special cases for one and two The header entry would be: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==2 ? 1 : 2; Languages with this property include: Celtic Gaeilge (Irish) Three forms, special case for numbers ending in 1[2-9] The header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : \ n%10>=2 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2; Languages with this property include: Baltic family Lithuanian Three forms, special cases for numbers ending in 1 and 2, 3, 4, except those ending in 1[1-4] The header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n%100/10==1 ? 2 : n%10==1 ? 0 : (n+9)%10>3 ? 2 : 1; Languages with this property include: Slavic family Croatian, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian Three forms, special cases for 1 and 2, 3, 4 The header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=(n==1) ? 1 : (n>=2 && n<=4) ? 2 : 0; Languages with this property include: Slavic family Slovak Three forms, special case for one and some numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 The header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n==1 ? 0 : \ n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2; Languages with this property include: Slavic family Polish Four forms, special case for one and all numbers ending in 02, 03, or 04 The header entry would look like this: Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; \ plural=n%100==1 ? 0 : n%100==2 ? 1 : n%100==3 || n%100==4 ? 2 : 3; Languages with this property include: Slavic family Slovenian ---------- Footnotes ---------- (1) Additions are welcome. Send appropriate information to .  File: libc.info, Node: Charset conversion in gettext, Next: GUI program problems, Prev: Advanced gettext functions, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.4 How to specify the output character set ‘gettext’ uses .............................................................. ‘gettext’ not only looks up a translation in a message catalog, it also converts the translation on the fly to the desired output character set. This is useful if the user is working in a different character set than the translator who created the message catalog, because it avoids distributing variants of message catalogs which differ only in the character set. The output character set is, by default, the value of ‘nl_langinfo (CODESET)’, which depends on the ‘LC_CTYPE’ part of the current locale. But programs which store strings in a locale independent way (e.g. UTF-8) can request that ‘gettext’ and related functions return the translations in that encoding, by use of the ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’ function. Note that the MSGID argument to ‘gettext’ is not subject to character set conversion. Also, when ‘gettext’ does not find a translation for MSGID, it returns MSGID unchanged – independently of the current output character set. It is therefore recommended that all MSGIDs be US-ASCII strings. -- Function: char * bind_textdomain_codeset (const char *DOMAINNAME, const char *CODESET) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’ function can be used to specify the output character set for message catalogs for domain DOMAINNAME. The CODESET argument must be a valid codeset name which can be used for the ‘iconv_open’ function, or a null pointer. If the CODESET parameter is the null pointer, ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’ returns the currently selected codeset for the domain with the name DOMAINNAME. It returns ‘NULL’ if no codeset has yet been selected. The ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’ function can be used several times. If used multiple times with the same DOMAINNAME argument, the later call overrides the settings made by the earlier one. The ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’ function returns a pointer to a string containing the name of the selected codeset. The string is allocated internally in the function and must not be changed by the user. If the system went out of core during the execution of ‘bind_textdomain_codeset’, the return value is ‘NULL’ and the global variable ERRNO is set accordingly.  File: libc.info, Node: GUI program problems, Next: Using gettextized software, Prev: Charset conversion in gettext, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.5 How to use ‘gettext’ in GUI programs ............................................ One place where the ‘gettext’ functions, if used normally, have big problems is within programs with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The problem is that many of the strings which have to be translated are very short. They have to appear in pull-down menus which restricts the length. But strings which are not containing entire sentences or at least large fragments of a sentence may appear in more than one situation in the program but might have different translations. This is especially true for the one-word strings which are frequently used in GUI programs. As a consequence many people say that the ‘gettext’ approach is wrong and instead ‘catgets’ should be used which indeed does not have this problem. But there is a very simple and powerful method to handle these kind of problems with the ‘gettext’ functions. As an example consider the following fictional situation. A GUI program has a menu bar with the following entries: +------------+------------+--------------------------------------+ | File | Printer | | +------------+------------+--------------------------------------+ | Open | | Select | | New | | Open | +----------+ | Connect | +----------+ To have the strings ‘File’, ‘Printer’, ‘Open’, ‘New’, ‘Select’, and ‘Connect’ translated there has to be at some point in the code a call to a function of the ‘gettext’ family. But in two places the string passed into the function would be ‘Open’. The translations might not be the same and therefore we are in the dilemma described above. One solution to this problem is to artificially extend the strings to make them unambiguous. But what would the program do if no translation is available? The extended string is not what should be printed. So we should use a slightly modified version of the functions. To extend the strings a uniform method should be used. E.g., in the example above, the strings could be chosen as Menu|File Menu|Printer Menu|File|Open Menu|File|New Menu|Printer|Select Menu|Printer|Open Menu|Printer|Connect Now all the strings are different and if now instead of ‘gettext’ the following little wrapper function is used, everything works just fine: char * sgettext (const char *msgid) { char *msgval = gettext (msgid); if (msgval == msgid) msgval = strrchr (msgid, '|') + 1; return msgval; } What this little function does is to recognize the case when no translation is available. This can be done very efficiently by a pointer comparison since the return value is the input value. If there is no translation we know that the input string is in the format we used for the Menu entries and therefore contains a ‘|’ character. We simply search for the last occurrence of this character and return a pointer to the character following it. That’s it! If one now consistently uses the extended string form and replaces the ‘gettext’ calls with calls to ‘sgettext’ (this is normally limited to very few places in the GUI implementation) then it is possible to produce a program which can be internationalized. With advanced compilers (such as GNU C) one can write the ‘sgettext’ functions as an inline function or as a macro like this: #define sgettext(msgid) \ ({ const char *__msgid = (msgid); \ char *__msgstr = gettext (__msgid); \ if (__msgval == __msgid) \ __msgval = strrchr (__msgid, '|') + 1; \ __msgval; }) The other ‘gettext’ functions (‘dgettext’, ‘dcgettext’ and the ‘ngettext’ equivalents) can and should have corresponding functions as well which look almost identical, except for the parameters and the call to the underlying function. Now there is of course the question why such functions do not exist in the GNU C Library? There are two parts of the answer to this question. • They are easy to write and therefore can be provided by the project they are used in. This is not an answer by itself and must be seen together with the second part which is: • There is no way the C library can contain a version which can work everywhere. The problem is the selection of the character to separate the prefix from the actual string in the extended string. The examples above used ‘|’ which is a quite good choice because it resembles a notation frequently used in this context and it also is a character not often used in message strings. But what if the character is used in message strings. Or if the chose character is not available in the character set on the machine one compiles (e.g., ‘|’ is not required to exist for ISO C; this is why the ‘iso646.h’ file exists in ISO C programming environments). There is only one more comment to make left. The wrapper function above requires that the translations strings are not extended themselves. This is only logical. There is no need to disambiguate the strings (since they are never used as keys for a search) and one also saves quite some memory and disk space by doing this.  File: libc.info, Node: Using gettextized software, Prev: GUI program problems, Up: Message catalogs with gettext 8.2.1.6 User influence on ‘gettext’ ................................... The last sections described what the programmer can do to internationalize the messages of the program. But it is finally up to the user to select the message s/he wants to see. S/He must understand them. The POSIX locale model uses the environment variables ‘LC_COLLATE’, ‘LC_CTYPE’, ‘LC_MESSAGES’, ‘LC_MONETARY’, ‘LC_NUMERIC’, and ‘LC_TIME’ to select the locale which is to be used. This way the user can influence lots of functions. As we mentioned above, the ‘gettext’ functions also take advantage of this. To understand how this happens it is necessary to take a look at the various components of the filename which gets computed to locate a message catalog. It is composed as follows: DIR_NAME/LOCALE/LC_CATEGORY/DOMAIN_NAME.mo The default value for DIR_NAME is system specific. It is computed from the value given as the prefix while configuring the C library. This value normally is ‘/usr’ or ‘/’. For the former the complete DIR_NAME is: /usr/share/locale We can use ‘/usr/share’ since the ‘.mo’ files containing the message catalogs are system independent, so all systems can use the same files. If the program executed the ‘bindtextdomain’ function for the message domain that is currently handled, the ‘dir_name’ component is exactly the value which was given to the function as the second parameter. I.e., ‘bindtextdomain’ allows overwriting the only system dependent and fixed value to make it possible to address files anywhere in the filesystem. The CATEGORY is the name of the locale category which was selected in the program code. For ‘gettext’ and ‘dgettext’ this is always ‘LC_MESSAGES’, for ‘dcgettext’ this is selected by the value of the third parameter. As said above it should be avoided to ever use a category other than ‘LC_MESSAGES’. The LOCALE component is computed based on the category used. Just like for the ‘setlocale’ function here comes the user selection into the play. Some environment variables are examined in a fixed order and the first environment variable set determines the return value of the lookup process. In detail, for the category ‘LC_xxx’ the following variables in this order are examined: ‘LANGUAGE’ ‘LC_ALL’ ‘LC_xxx’ ‘LANG’ This looks very familiar. With the exception of the ‘LANGUAGE’ environment variable this is exactly the lookup order the ‘setlocale’ function uses. But why introduce the ‘LANGUAGE’ variable? The reason is that the syntax of the values these variables can have is different to what is expected by the ‘setlocale’ function. If we would set ‘LC_ALL’ to a value following the extended syntax that would mean the ‘setlocale’ function will never be able to use the value of this variable as well. An additional variable removes this problem plus we can select the language independently of the locale setting which sometimes is useful. While for the ‘LC_xxx’ variables the value should consist of exactly one specification of a locale the ‘LANGUAGE’ variable’s value can consist of a colon separated list of locale names. The attentive reader will realize that this is the way we manage to implement one of our additional demands above: we want to be able to specify an ordered list of languages. Back to the constructed filename we have only one component missing. The DOMAIN_NAME part is the name which was either registered using the ‘textdomain’ function or which was given to ‘dgettext’ or ‘dcgettext’ as the first parameter. Now it becomes obvious that a good choice for the domain name in the program code is a string which is closely related to the program/package name. E.g., for the GNU C Library the domain name is ‘libc’. A limited piece of example code should show how the program is supposed to work: { setlocale (LC_ALL, ""); textdomain ("test-package"); bindtextdomain ("test-package", "/usr/local/share/locale"); puts (gettext ("Hello, world!")); } At the program start the default domain is ‘messages’, and the default locale is "C". The ‘setlocale’ call sets the locale according to the user’s environment variables; remember that correct functioning of ‘gettext’ relies on the correct setting of the ‘LC_MESSAGES’ locale (for looking up the message catalog) and of the ‘LC_CTYPE’ locale (for the character set conversion). The ‘textdomain’ call changes the default domain to ‘test-package’. The ‘bindtextdomain’ call specifies that the message catalogs for the domain ‘test-package’ can be found below the directory ‘/usr/local/share/locale’. If the user sets in her/his environment the variable ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘de’ the ‘gettext’ function will try to use the translations from the file /usr/local/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/test-package.mo From the above descriptions it should be clear which component of this filename is determined by which source. In the above example we assumed the ‘LANGUAGE’ environment variable to be ‘de’. This might be an appropriate selection but what happens if the user wants to use ‘LC_ALL’ because of the wider usability and here the required value is ‘de_DE.ISO-8859-1’? We already mentioned above that a situation like this is not infrequent. E.g., a person might prefer reading a dialect and if this is not available fall back on the standard language. The ‘gettext’ functions know about situations like this and can handle them gracefully. The functions recognize the format of the value of the environment variable. It can split the value is different pieces and by leaving out the only or the other part it can construct new values. This happens of course in a predictable way. To understand this one must know the format of the environment variable value. There is one more or less standardized form, originally from the X/Open specification: ‘language[_territory[.codeset]][@modifier]’ Less specific locale names will be stripped in the order of the following list: 1. ‘codeset’ 2. ‘normalized codeset’ 3. ‘territory’ 4. ‘modifier’ The ‘language’ field will never be dropped for obvious reasons. The only new thing is the ‘normalized codeset’ entry. This is another goodie which is introduced to help reduce the chaos which derives from the inability of people to standardize the names of character sets. Instead of ISO-8859-1 one can often see 8859-1, 88591, iso8859-1, or iso_8859-1. The ‘normalized codeset’ value is generated from the user-provided character set name by applying the following rules: 1. Remove all characters besides numbers and letters. 2. Fold letters to lowercase. 3. If the same only contains digits prepend the string ‘"iso"’. So all of the above names will be normalized to ‘iso88591’. This allows the program user much more freedom in choosing the locale name. Even this extended functionality still does not help to solve the problem that completely different names can be used to denote the same locale (e.g., ‘de’ and ‘german’). To be of help in this situation the locale implementation and also the ‘gettext’ functions know about aliases. The file ‘/usr/share/locale/locale.alias’ (replace ‘/usr’ with whatever prefix you used for configuring the C library) contains a mapping of alternative names to more regular names. The system manager is free to add new entries to fill her/his own needs. The selected locale from the environment is compared with the entries in the first column of this file ignoring the case. If they match, the value of the second column is used instead for the further handling. In the description of the format of the environment variables we already mentioned the character set as a factor in the selection of the message catalog. In fact, only catalogs which contain text written using the character set of the system/program can be used (directly; there will come a solution for this some day). This means for the user that s/he will always have to take care of this. If in the collection of the message catalogs there are files for the same language but coded using different character sets the user has to be careful.  File: libc.info, Node: Helper programs for gettext, Prev: Message catalogs with gettext, Up: The Uniforum approach 8.2.2 Programs to handle message catalogs for ‘gettext’ ------------------------------------------------------- The GNU C Library does not contain the source code for the programs to handle message catalogs for the ‘gettext’ functions. As part of the GNU project the GNU gettext package contains everything the developer needs. The functionality provided by the tools in this package by far exceeds the abilities of the ‘gencat’ program described above for the ‘catgets’ functions. There is a program ‘msgfmt’ which is the equivalent program to the ‘gencat’ program. It generates from the human-readable and -editable form of the message catalog a binary file which can be used by the ‘gettext’ functions. But there are several more programs available. The ‘xgettext’ program can be used to automatically extract the translatable messages from a source file. I.e., the programmer need not take care of the translations and the list of messages which have to be translated. S/He will simply wrap the translatable string in calls to ‘gettext’ et.al and the rest will be done by ‘xgettext’. This program has a lot of options which help to customize the output or help to understand the input better. Other programs help to manage the development cycle when new messages appear in the source files or when a new translation of the messages appears. Here it should only be noted that using all the tools in GNU gettext it is possible to _completely_ automate the handling of message catalogs. Besides marking the translatable strings in the source code and generating the translations the developers do not have anything to do themselves.  File: libc.info, Node: Searching and Sorting, Next: Pattern Matching, Prev: Message Translation, Up: Top 9 Searching and Sorting *********************** This chapter describes functions for searching and sorting arrays of arbitrary objects. You pass the appropriate comparison function to be applied as an argument, along with the size of the objects in the array and the total number of elements. * Menu: * Comparison Functions:: Defining how to compare two objects. Since the sort and search facilities are general, you have to specify the ordering. * Array Search Function:: The ‘bsearch’ function. * Array Sort Function:: The ‘qsort’ function. * Search/Sort Example:: An example program. * Hash Search Function:: The ‘hsearch’ function. * Tree Search Function:: The ‘tsearch’ function.  File: libc.info, Node: Comparison Functions, Next: Array Search Function, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.1 Defining the Comparison Function ==================================== In order to use the sorted array library functions, you have to describe how to compare the elements of the array. To do this, you supply a comparison function to compare two elements of the array. The library will call this function, passing as arguments pointers to two array elements to be compared. Your comparison function should return a value the way ‘strcmp’ (*note String/Array Comparison::) does: negative if the first argument is “less” than the second, zero if they are “equal”, and positive if the first argument is “greater”. Here is an example of a comparison function which works with an array of numbers of type ‘double’: int compare_doubles (const void *a, const void *b) { const double *da = (const double *) a; const double *db = (const double *) b; return (*da > *db) - (*da < *db); } The header file ‘stdlib.h’ defines a name for the data type of comparison functions. This type is a GNU extension. int comparison_fn_t (const void *, const void *);  File: libc.info, Node: Array Search Function, Next: Array Sort Function, Prev: Comparison Functions, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.2 Array Search Function ========================= Generally searching for a specific element in an array means that potentially all elements must be checked. The GNU C Library contains functions to perform linear search. The prototypes for the following two functions can be found in ‘search.h’. -- Function: void * lfind (const void *KEY, const void *BASE, size_t *NMEMB, size_t SIZE, comparison_fn_t COMPAR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘lfind’ function searches in the array with ‘*NMEMB’ elements of SIZE bytes pointed to by BASE for an element which matches the one pointed to by KEY. The function pointed to by COMPAR is used to decide whether two elements match. The return value is a pointer to the matching element in the array starting at BASE if it is found. If no matching element is available ‘NULL’ is returned. The mean runtime of this function is ‘*NMEMB’/2. This function should only be used if elements often get added to or deleted from the array in which case it might not be useful to sort the array before searching. -- Function: void * lsearch (const void *KEY, void *BASE, size_t *NMEMB, size_t SIZE, comparison_fn_t COMPAR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘lsearch’ function is similar to the ‘lfind’ function. It searches the given array for an element and returns it if found. The difference is that if no matching element is found the ‘lsearch’ function adds the object pointed to by KEY (with a size of SIZE bytes) at the end of the array and it increments the value of ‘*NMEMB’ to reflect this addition. This means for the caller that if it is not sure that the array contains the element one is searching for the memory allocated for the array starting at BASE must have room for at least SIZE more bytes. If one is sure the element is in the array it is better to use ‘lfind’ so having more room in the array is always necessary when calling ‘lsearch’. To search a sorted array for an element matching the key, use the ‘bsearch’ function. The prototype for this function is in the header file ‘stdlib.h’. -- Function: void * bsearch (const void *KEY, const void *ARRAY, size_t COUNT, size_t SIZE, comparison_fn_t COMPARE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘bsearch’ function searches the sorted array ARRAY for an object that is equivalent to KEY. The array contains COUNT elements, each of which is of size SIZE bytes. The COMPARE function is used to perform the comparison. This function is called with two pointer arguments and should return an integer less than, equal to, or greater than zero corresponding to whether its first argument is considered less than, equal to, or greater than its second argument. The elements of the ARRAY must already be sorted in ascending order according to this comparison function. The return value is a pointer to the matching array element, or a null pointer if no match is found. If the array contains more than one element that matches, the one that is returned is unspecified. This function derives its name from the fact that it is implemented using the binary search algorithm.  File: libc.info, Node: Array Sort Function, Next: Search/Sort Example, Prev: Array Search Function, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.3 Array Sort Function ======================= To sort an array using an arbitrary comparison function, use the ‘qsort’ function. The prototype for this function is in ‘stdlib.h’. -- Function: void qsort (void *ARRAY, size_t COUNT, size_t SIZE, comparison_fn_t COMPARE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘qsort’ function sorts the array ARRAY. The array contains COUNT elements, each of which is of size SIZE. The COMPARE function is used to perform the comparison on the array elements. This function is called with two pointer arguments and should return an integer less than, equal to, or greater than zero corresponding to whether its first argument is considered less than, equal to, or greater than its second argument. *Warning:* If two objects compare as equal, their order after sorting is unpredictable. That is to say, the sorting is not stable. This can make a difference when the comparison considers only part of the elements. Two elements with the same sort key may differ in other respects. Although the object addresses passed to the comparison function lie within the array, they need not correspond with the original locations of those objects because the sorting algorithm may swap around objects in the array before making some comparisons. The only way to perform a stable sort with ‘qsort’ is to first augment the objects with a monotonic counter of some kind. Here is a simple example of sorting an array of doubles in numerical order, using the comparison function defined above (*note Comparison Functions::): { double *array; int size; ... qsort (array, size, sizeof (double), compare_doubles); } The ‘qsort’ function derives its name from the fact that it was originally implemented using the “quick sort” algorithm. The implementation of ‘qsort’ in this library might not be an in-place sort and might thereby use an extra amount of memory to store the array.  File: libc.info, Node: Search/Sort Example, Next: Hash Search Function, Prev: Array Sort Function, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.4 Searching and Sorting Example ================================= Here is an example showing the use of ‘qsort’ and ‘bsearch’ with an array of structures. The objects in the array are sorted by comparing their ‘name’ fields with the ‘strcmp’ function. Then, we can look up individual objects based on their names. #include #include #include /* Define an array of critters to sort. */ struct critter { const char *name; const char *species; }; struct critter muppets[] = { {"Kermit", "frog"}, {"Piggy", "pig"}, {"Gonzo", "whatever"}, {"Fozzie", "bear"}, {"Sam", "eagle"}, {"Robin", "frog"}, {"Animal", "animal"}, {"Camilla", "chicken"}, {"Sweetums", "monster"}, {"Dr. Strangepork", "pig"}, {"Link Hogthrob", "pig"}, {"Zoot", "human"}, {"Dr. Bunsen Honeydew", "human"}, {"Beaker", "human"}, {"Swedish Chef", "human"} }; int count = sizeof (muppets) / sizeof (struct critter); /* This is the comparison function used for sorting and searching. */ int critter_cmp (const void *v1, const void *v2) { const struct critter *c1 = v1; const struct critter *c2 = v2; return strcmp (c1->name, c2->name); } /* Print information about a critter. */ void print_critter (const struct critter *c) { printf ("%s, the %s\n", c->name, c->species); } /* Do the lookup into the sorted array. */ void find_critter (const char *name) { struct critter target, *result; target.name = name; result = bsearch (&target, muppets, count, sizeof (struct critter), critter_cmp); if (result) print_critter (result); else printf ("Couldn't find %s.\n", name); } /* Main program. */ int main (void) { int i; for (i = 0; i < count; i++) print_critter (&muppets[i]); printf ("\n"); qsort (muppets, count, sizeof (struct critter), critter_cmp); for (i = 0; i < count; i++) print_critter (&muppets[i]); printf ("\n"); find_critter ("Kermit"); find_critter ("Gonzo"); find_critter ("Janice"); return 0; } The output from this program looks like: Kermit, the frog Piggy, the pig Gonzo, the whatever Fozzie, the bear Sam, the eagle Robin, the frog Animal, the animal Camilla, the chicken Sweetums, the monster Dr. Strangepork, the pig Link Hogthrob, the pig Zoot, the human Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the human Beaker, the human Swedish Chef, the human Animal, the animal Beaker, the human Camilla, the chicken Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the human Dr. Strangepork, the pig Fozzie, the bear Gonzo, the whatever Kermit, the frog Link Hogthrob, the pig Piggy, the pig Robin, the frog Sam, the eagle Swedish Chef, the human Sweetums, the monster Zoot, the human Kermit, the frog Gonzo, the whatever Couldn't find Janice.  File: libc.info, Node: Hash Search Function, Next: Tree Search Function, Prev: Search/Sort Example, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.5 The ‘hsearch’ function. =========================== The functions mentioned so far in this chapter are for searching in a sorted or unsorted array. There are other methods to organize information which later should be searched. The costs of insert, delete and search differ. One possible implementation is using hashing tables. The following functions are declared in the header file ‘search.h’. -- Function: int hcreate (size_t NEL) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:hsearch | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘hcreate’ function creates a hashing table which can contain at least NEL elements. There is no possibility to grow this table so it is necessary to choose the value for NEL wisely. The method used to implement this function might make it necessary to make the number of elements in the hashing table larger than the expected maximal number of elements. Hashing tables usually work inefficiently if they are filled 80% or more. The constant access time guaranteed by hashing can only be achieved if few collisions exist. See Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming, Part 3: Searching and Sorting” for more information. The weakest aspect of this function is that there can be at most one hashing table used through the whole program. The table is allocated in local memory out of control of the programmer. As an extension the GNU C Library provides an additional set of functions with a reentrant interface which provides a similar interface but which allows keeping arbitrarily many hashing tables. It is possible to use more than one hashing table in the program run if the former table is first destroyed by a call to ‘hdestroy’. The function returns a non-zero value if successful. If it returns zero, something went wrong. This could either mean there is already a hashing table in use or the program ran out of memory. -- Function: void hdestroy (void) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:hsearch | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘hdestroy’ function can be used to free all the resources allocated in a previous call of ‘hcreate’. After a call to this function it is again possible to call ‘hcreate’ and allocate a new table with possibly different size. It is important to remember that the elements contained in the hashing table at the time ‘hdestroy’ is called are _not_ freed by this function. It is the responsibility of the program code to free those strings (if necessary at all). Freeing all the element memory is not possible without extra, separately kept information since there is no function to iterate through all available elements in the hashing table. If it is really necessary to free a table and all elements the programmer has to keep a list of all table elements and before calling ‘hdestroy’ s/he has to free all element’s data using this list. This is a very unpleasant mechanism and it also shows that this kind of hashing table is mainly meant for tables which are created once and used until the end of the program run. Entries of the hashing table and keys for the search are defined using this type: -- Data type: struct ENTRY Both elements of this structure are pointers to zero-terminated strings. This is a limiting restriction of the functionality of the ‘hsearch’ functions. They can only be used for data sets which use the NUL character always and solely to terminate the records. It is not possible to handle general binary data. ‘char *key’ Pointer to a zero-terminated string of characters describing the key for the search or the element in the hashing table. ‘char *data’ Pointer to a zero-terminated string of characters describing the data. If the functions will be called only for searching an existing entry this element might stay undefined since it is not used. -- Function: ENTRY * hsearch (ENTRY ITEM, ACTION ACTION) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:hsearch | AS-Unsafe | AC-Unsafe corrupt/action==ENTER | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. To search in a hashing table created using ‘hcreate’ the ‘hsearch’ function must be used. This function can perform a simple search for an element (if ACTION has the value ‘FIND’) or it can alternatively insert the key element into the hashing table. Entries are never replaced. The key is denoted by a pointer to an object of type ‘ENTRY’. For locating the corresponding position in the hashing table only the ‘key’ element of the structure is used. If an entry with a matching key is found the ACTION parameter is irrelevant. The found entry is returned. If no matching entry is found and the ACTION parameter has the value ‘FIND’ the function returns a ‘NULL’ pointer. If no entry is found and the ACTION parameter has the value ‘ENTER’ a new entry is added to the hashing table which is initialized with the parameter ITEM. A pointer to the newly added entry is returned. As mentioned before, the hashing table used by the functions described so far is global and there can be at any time at most one hashing table in the program. A solution is to use the following functions which are a GNU extension. All have in common that they operate on a hashing table which is described by the content of an object of the type ‘struct hsearch_data’. This type should be treated as opaque, none of its members should be changed directly. -- Function: int hcreate_r (size_t NEL, struct hsearch_data *HTAB) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:htab | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘hcreate_r’ function initializes the object pointed to by HTAB to contain a hashing table with at least NEL elements. So this function is equivalent to the ‘hcreate’ function except that the initialized data structure is controlled by the user. This allows having more than one hashing table at one time. The memory necessary for the ‘struct hsearch_data’ object can be allocated dynamically. It must be initialized with zero before calling this function. The return value is non-zero if the operation was successful. If the return value is zero, something went wrong, which probably means the program ran out of memory. -- Function: void hdestroy_r (struct hsearch_data *HTAB) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:htab | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘hdestroy_r’ function frees all resources allocated by the ‘hcreate_r’ function for this very same object HTAB. As for ‘hdestroy’ it is the program’s responsibility to free the strings for the elements of the table. -- Function: int hsearch_r (ENTRY ITEM, ACTION ACTION, ENTRY **RETVAL, struct hsearch_data *HTAB) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:htab | AS-Safe | AC-Unsafe corrupt/action==ENTER | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘hsearch_r’ function is equivalent to ‘hsearch’. The meaning of the first two arguments is identical. But instead of operating on a single global hashing table the function works on the table described by the object pointed to by HTAB (which is initialized by a call to ‘hcreate_r’). Another difference to ‘hcreate’ is that the pointer to the found entry in the table is not the return value of the function. It is returned by storing it in a pointer variable pointed to by the RETVAL parameter. The return value of the function is an integer value indicating success if it is non-zero and failure if it is zero. In the latter case the global variable ERRNO signals the reason for the failure. ‘ENOMEM’ The table is filled and ‘hsearch_r’ was called with a so far unknown key and ACTION set to ‘ENTER’. ‘ESRCH’ The ACTION parameter is ‘FIND’ and no corresponding element is found in the table.  File: libc.info, Node: Tree Search Function, Prev: Hash Search Function, Up: Searching and Sorting 9.6 The ‘tsearch’ function. =========================== Another common form to organize data for efficient search is to use trees. The ‘tsearch’ function family provides a nice interface to functions to organize possibly large amounts of data by providing a mean access time proportional to the logarithm of the number of elements. The GNU C Library implementation even guarantees that this bound is never exceeded even for input data which cause problems for simple binary tree implementations. The functions described in the chapter are all described in the System V and X/Open specifications and are therefore quite portable. In contrast to the ‘hsearch’ functions the ‘tsearch’ functions can be used with arbitrary data and not only zero-terminated strings. The ‘tsearch’ functions have the advantage that no function to initialize data structures is necessary. A simple pointer of type ‘void *’ initialized to ‘NULL’ is a valid tree and can be extended or searched. The prototypes for these functions can be found in the header file ‘search.h’. -- Function: void * tsearch (const void *KEY, void **ROOTP, comparison_fn_t COMPAR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:rootp | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘tsearch’ function searches in the tree pointed to by ‘*ROOTP’ for an element matching KEY. The function pointed to by COMPAR is used to determine whether two elements match. *Note Comparison Functions::, for a specification of the functions which can be used for the COMPAR parameter. If the tree does not contain a matching entry the KEY value will be added to the tree. ‘tsearch’ does not make a copy of the object pointed to by KEY (how could it since the size is unknown). Instead it adds a reference to this object which means the object must be available as long as the tree data structure is used. The tree is represented by a pointer to a pointer since it is sometimes necessary to change the root node of the tree. So it must not be assumed that the variable pointed to by ROOTP has the same value after the call. This also shows that it is not safe to call the ‘tsearch’ function more than once at the same time using the same tree. It is no problem to run it more than once at a time on different trees. The return value is a pointer to the matching element in the tree. If a new element was created the pointer points to the new data (which is in fact KEY). If an entry had to be created and the program ran out of space ‘NULL’ is returned. -- Function: void * tfind (const void *KEY, void *const *ROOTP, comparison_fn_t COMPAR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:rootp | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘tfind’ function is similar to the ‘tsearch’ function. It locates an element matching the one pointed to by KEY and returns a pointer to this element. But if no matching element is available no new element is entered (note that the ROOTP parameter points to a constant pointer). Instead the function returns ‘NULL’. Another advantage of the ‘tsearch’ functions in contrast to the ‘hsearch’ functions is that there is an easy way to remove elements. -- Function: void * tdelete (const void *KEY, void **ROOTP, comparison_fn_t COMPAR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:rootp | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. To remove a specific element matching KEY from the tree ‘tdelete’ can be used. It locates the matching element using the same method as ‘tfind’. The corresponding element is then removed and a pointer to the parent of the deleted node is returned by the function. If there is no matching entry in the tree nothing can be deleted and the function returns ‘NULL’. If the root of the tree is deleted ‘tdelete’ returns some unspecified value not equal to ‘NULL’. -- Function: void tdestroy (void *VROOT, __free_fn_t FREEFCT) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. If the complete search tree has to be removed one can use ‘tdestroy’. It frees all resources allocated by the ‘tsearch’ functions to generate the tree pointed to by VROOT. For the data in each tree node the function FREEFCT is called. The pointer to the data is passed as the argument to the function. If no such work is necessary FREEFCT must point to a function doing nothing. It is called in any case. This function is a GNU extension and not covered by the System V or X/Open specifications. In addition to the functions to create and destroy the tree data structure, there is another function which allows you to apply a function to all elements of the tree. The function must have this type: void __action_fn_t (const void *nodep, VISIT value, int level); The NODEP is the data value of the current node (once given as the KEY argument to ‘tsearch’). LEVEL is a numeric value which corresponds to the depth of the current node in the tree. The root node has the depth 0 and its children have a depth of 1 and so on. The ‘VISIT’ type is an enumeration type. -- Data Type: VISIT The ‘VISIT’ value indicates the status of the current node in the tree and how the function is called. The status of a node is either ‘leaf’ or ‘internal node’. For each leaf node the function is called exactly once, for each internal node it is called three times: before the first child is processed, after the first child is processed and after both children are processed. This makes it possible to handle all three methods of tree traversal (or even a combination of them). ‘preorder’ The current node is an internal node and the function is called before the first child was processed. ‘postorder’ The current node is an internal node and the function is called after the first child was processed. ‘endorder’ The current node is an internal node and the function is called after the second child was processed. ‘leaf’ The current node is a leaf. -- Function: void twalk (const void *ROOT, __action_fn_t ACTION) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:root | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. For each node in the tree with a node pointed to by ROOT, the ‘twalk’ function calls the function provided by the parameter ACTION. For leaf nodes the function is called exactly once with VALUE set to ‘leaf’. For internal nodes the function is called three times, setting the VALUE parameter or ACTION to the appropriate value. The LEVEL argument for the ACTION function is computed while descending the tree by increasing the value by one for each descent to a child, starting with the value 0 for the root node. Since the functions used for the ACTION parameter to ‘twalk’ must not modify the tree data, it is safe to run ‘twalk’ in more than one thread at the same time, working on the same tree. It is also safe to call ‘tfind’ in parallel. Functions which modify the tree must not be used, otherwise the behavior is undefined.  File: libc.info, Node: Pattern Matching, Next: I/O Overview, Prev: Searching and Sorting, Up: Top 10 Pattern Matching ******************* The GNU C Library provides pattern matching facilities for two kinds of patterns: regular expressions and file-name wildcards. The library also provides a facility for expanding variable and command references and parsing text into words in the way the shell does. * Menu: * Wildcard Matching:: Matching a wildcard pattern against a single string. * Globbing:: Finding the files that match a wildcard pattern. * Regular Expressions:: Matching regular expressions against strings. * Word Expansion:: Expanding shell variables, nested commands, arithmetic, and wildcards. This is what the shell does with shell commands.  File: libc.info, Node: Wildcard Matching, Next: Globbing, Up: Pattern Matching 10.1 Wildcard Matching ====================== This section describes how to match a wildcard pattern against a particular string. The result is a yes or no answer: does the string fit the pattern or not. The symbols described here are all declared in ‘fnmatch.h’. -- Function: int fnmatch (const char *PATTERN, const char *STRING, int FLAGS) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env locale | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function tests whether the string STRING matches the pattern PATTERN. It returns ‘0’ if they do match; otherwise, it returns the nonzero value ‘FNM_NOMATCH’. The arguments PATTERN and STRING are both strings. The argument FLAGS is a combination of flag bits that alter the details of matching. See below for a list of the defined flags. In the GNU C Library, ‘fnmatch’ might sometimes report “errors” by returning nonzero values that are not equal to ‘FNM_NOMATCH’. These are the available flags for the FLAGS argument: ‘FNM_FILE_NAME’ Treat the ‘/’ character specially, for matching file names. If this flag is set, wildcard constructs in PATTERN cannot match ‘/’ in STRING. Thus, the only way to match ‘/’ is with an explicit ‘/’ in PATTERN. ‘FNM_PATHNAME’ This is an alias for ‘FNM_FILE_NAME’; it comes from POSIX.2. We don’t recommend this name because we don’t use the term “pathname” for file names. ‘FNM_PERIOD’ Treat the ‘.’ character specially if it appears at the beginning of STRING. If this flag is set, wildcard constructs in PATTERN cannot match ‘.’ as the first character of STRING. If you set both ‘FNM_PERIOD’ and ‘FNM_FILE_NAME’, then the special treatment applies to ‘.’ following ‘/’ as well as to ‘.’ at the beginning of STRING. (The shell uses the ‘FNM_PERIOD’ and ‘FNM_FILE_NAME’ flags together for matching file names.) ‘FNM_NOESCAPE’ Don’t treat the ‘\’ character specially in patterns. Normally, ‘\’ quotes the following character, turning off its special meaning (if any) so that it matches only itself. When quoting is enabled, the pattern ‘\?’ matches only the string ‘?’, because the question mark in the pattern acts like an ordinary character. If you use ‘FNM_NOESCAPE’, then ‘\’ is an ordinary character. ‘FNM_LEADING_DIR’ Ignore a trailing sequence of characters starting with a ‘/’ in STRING; that is to say, test whether STRING starts with a directory name that PATTERN matches. If this flag is set, either ‘foo*’ or ‘foobar’ as a pattern would match the string ‘foobar/frobozz’. ‘FNM_CASEFOLD’ Ignore case in comparing STRING to PATTERN. ‘FNM_EXTMATCH’ Besides the normal patterns, also recognize the extended patterns introduced in ‘ksh’. The patterns are written in the form explained in the following table where PATTERN-LIST is a ‘|’ separated list of patterns. ‘?(PATTERN-LIST)’ The pattern matches if zero or one occurrences of any of the patterns in the PATTERN-LIST allow matching the input string. ‘*(PATTERN-LIST)’ The pattern matches if zero or more occurrences of any of the patterns in the PATTERN-LIST allow matching the input string. ‘+(PATTERN-LIST)’ The pattern matches if one or more occurrences of any of the patterns in the PATTERN-LIST allow matching the input string. ‘@(PATTERN-LIST)’ The pattern matches if exactly one occurrence of any of the patterns in the PATTERN-LIST allows matching the input string. ‘!(PATTERN-LIST)’ The pattern matches if the input string cannot be matched with any of the patterns in the PATTERN-LIST.  File: libc.info, Node: Globbing, Next: Regular Expressions, Prev: Wildcard Matching, Up: Pattern Matching 10.2 Globbing ============= The archetypal use of wildcards is for matching against the files in a directory, and making a list of all the matches. This is called “globbing”. You could do this using ‘fnmatch’, by reading the directory entries one by one and testing each one with ‘fnmatch’. But that would be slow (and complex, since you would have to handle subdirectories by hand). The library provides a function ‘glob’ to make this particular use of wildcards convenient. ‘glob’ and the other symbols in this section are declared in ‘glob.h’. * Menu: * Calling Glob:: Basic use of ‘glob’. * Flags for Globbing:: Flags that enable various options in ‘glob’. * More Flags for Globbing:: GNU specific extensions to ‘glob’.  File: libc.info, Node: Calling Glob, Next: Flags for Globbing, Up: Globbing 10.2.1 Calling ‘glob’ --------------------- The result of globbing is a vector of file names (strings). To return this vector, ‘glob’ uses a special data type, ‘glob_t’, which is a structure. You pass ‘glob’ the address of the structure, and it fills in the structure’s fields to tell you about the results. -- Data Type: glob_t This data type holds a pointer to a word vector. More precisely, it records both the address of the word vector and its size. The GNU implementation contains some more fields which are non-standard extensions. ‘gl_pathc’ The number of elements in the vector, excluding the initial null entries if the GLOB_DOOFFS flag is used (see gl_offs below). ‘gl_pathv’ The address of the vector. This field has type ‘char **’. ‘gl_offs’ The offset of the first real element of the vector, from its nominal address in the ‘gl_pathv’ field. Unlike the other fields, this is always an input to ‘glob’, rather than an output from it. If you use a nonzero offset, then that many elements at the beginning of the vector are left empty. (The ‘glob’ function fills them with null pointers.) The ‘gl_offs’ field is meaningful only if you use the ‘GLOB_DOOFFS’ flag. Otherwise, the offset is always zero regardless of what is in this field, and the first real element comes at the beginning of the vector. ‘gl_closedir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘closedir’ function. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘void (*) (void *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_readdir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘readdir’ function used to read the contents of a directory. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘struct dirent *(*) (void *)’. An implementation of ‘gl_readdir’ needs to initialize the following members of the ‘struct dirent’ object: ‘d_type’ This member should be set to the file type of the entry if it is known. Otherwise, the value ‘DT_UNKNOWN’ can be used. The ‘glob’ function may use the specified file type to avoid callbacks in cases where the file type indicates that the data is not required. ‘d_ino’ This member needs to be non-zero, otherwise ‘glob’ may skip the current entry and call the ‘gl_readdir’ callback function again to retrieve another entry. ‘d_name’ This member must be set to the name of the entry. It must be null-terminated. The example below shows how to allocate a ‘struct dirent’ object containing a given name. #include #include #include #include #include struct dirent * mkdirent (const char *name) { size_t dirent_size = offsetof (struct dirent, d_name) + 1; size_t name_length = strlen (name); size_t total_size = dirent_size + name_length; if (total_size < dirent_size) { errno = ENOMEM; return NULL; } struct dirent *result = malloc (total_size); if (result == NULL) return NULL; result->d_type = DT_UNKNOWN; result->d_ino = 1; /* Do not skip this entry. */ memcpy (result->d_name, name, name_length + 1); return result; } The ‘glob’ function reads the ‘struct dirent’ members listed above and makes a copy of the file name in the ‘d_name’ member immediately after the ‘gl_readdir’ callback function returns. Future invocations of any of the callback functions may dealloacte or reuse the buffer. It is the responsibility of the caller of the ‘glob’ function to allocate and deallocate the buffer, around the call to ‘glob’ or using the callback functions. For example, an application could allocate the buffer in the ‘gl_readdir’ callback function, and deallocate it in the ‘gl_closedir’ callback function. The ‘gl_readdir’ member is a GNU extension. ‘gl_opendir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘opendir’ function. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘void *(*) (const char *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_stat’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘stat’ function to get information about an object in the filesystem. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘int (*) (const char *, struct stat *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_lstat’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘lstat’ function to get information about an object in the filesystems, not following symbolic links. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘int (*) (const char *, struct stat *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_flags’ The flags used when ‘glob’ was called. In addition, ‘GLOB_MAGCHAR’ might be set. See *note Flags for Globbing:: for more details. This is a GNU extension. For use in the ‘glob64’ function ‘glob.h’ contains another definition for a very similar type. ‘glob64_t’ differs from ‘glob_t’ only in the types of the members ‘gl_readdir’, ‘gl_stat’, and ‘gl_lstat’. -- Data Type: glob64_t This data type holds a pointer to a word vector. More precisely, it records both the address of the word vector and its size. The GNU implementation contains some more fields which are non-standard extensions. ‘gl_pathc’ The number of elements in the vector, excluding the initial null entries if the GLOB_DOOFFS flag is used (see gl_offs below). ‘gl_pathv’ The address of the vector. This field has type ‘char **’. ‘gl_offs’ The offset of the first real element of the vector, from its nominal address in the ‘gl_pathv’ field. Unlike the other fields, this is always an input to ‘glob’, rather than an output from it. If you use a nonzero offset, then that many elements at the beginning of the vector are left empty. (The ‘glob’ function fills them with null pointers.) The ‘gl_offs’ field is meaningful only if you use the ‘GLOB_DOOFFS’ flag. Otherwise, the offset is always zero regardless of what is in this field, and the first real element comes at the beginning of the vector. ‘gl_closedir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘closedir’ function. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘void (*) (void *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_readdir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘readdir64’ function used to read the contents of a directory. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘struct dirent64 *(*) (void *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_opendir’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘opendir’ function. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘void *(*) (const char *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_stat’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘stat64’ function to get information about an object in the filesystem. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘int (*) (const char *, struct stat64 *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_lstat’ The address of an alternative implementation of the ‘lstat64’ function to get information about an object in the filesystems, not following symbolic links. It is used if the ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ bit is set in the flag parameter. The type of this field is ‘int (*) (const char *, struct stat64 *)’. This is a GNU extension. ‘gl_flags’ The flags used when ‘glob’ was called. In addition, ‘GLOB_MAGCHAR’ might be set. See *note Flags for Globbing:: for more details. This is a GNU extension. -- Function: int glob (const char *PATTERN, int FLAGS, int (*ERRFUNC) (const char *FILENAME, int ERROR-CODE), glob_t *VECTOR-PTR) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:utent env sig:ALRM timer locale | AS-Unsafe dlopen plugin corrupt heap lock | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The function ‘glob’ does globbing using the pattern PATTERN in the current directory. It puts the result in a newly allocated vector, and stores the size and address of this vector into ‘*VECTOR-PTR’. The argument FLAGS is a combination of bit flags; see *note Flags for Globbing::, for details of the flags. The result of globbing is a sequence of file names. The function ‘glob’ allocates a string for each resulting word, then allocates a vector of type ‘char **’ to store the addresses of these strings. The last element of the vector is a null pointer. This vector is called the “word vector”. To return this vector, ‘glob’ stores both its address and its length (number of elements, not counting the terminating null pointer) into ‘*VECTOR-PTR’. Normally, ‘glob’ sorts the file names alphabetically before returning them. You can turn this off with the flag ‘GLOB_NOSORT’ if you want to get the information as fast as possible. Usually it’s a good idea to let ‘glob’ sort them—if you process the files in alphabetical order, the users will have a feel for the rate of progress that your application is making. If ‘glob’ succeeds, it returns 0. Otherwise, it returns one of these error codes: ‘GLOB_ABORTED’ There was an error opening a directory, and you used the flag ‘GLOB_ERR’ or your specified ERRFUNC returned a nonzero value. *Note Flags for Globbing::, for an explanation of the ‘GLOB_ERR’ flag and ERRFUNC. ‘GLOB_NOMATCH’ The pattern didn’t match any existing files. If you use the ‘GLOB_NOCHECK’ flag, then you never get this error code, because that flag tells ‘glob’ to _pretend_ that the pattern matched at least one file. ‘GLOB_NOSPACE’ It was impossible to allocate memory to hold the result. In the event of an error, ‘glob’ stores information in ‘*VECTOR-PTR’ about all the matches it has found so far. It is important to notice that the ‘glob’ function will not fail if it encounters directories or files which cannot be handled without the LFS interfaces. The implementation of ‘glob’ is supposed to use these functions internally. This at least is the assumption made by the Unix standard. The GNU extension of allowing the user to provide their own directory handling and ‘stat’ functions complicates things a bit. If these callback functions are used and a large file or directory is encountered ‘glob’ _can_ fail. -- Function: int glob64 (const char *PATTERN, int FLAGS, int (*ERRFUNC) (const char *FILENAME, int ERROR-CODE), glob64_t *VECTOR-PTR) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:utent env sig:ALRM timer locale | AS-Unsafe dlopen corrupt heap lock | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘glob64’ function was added as part of the Large File Summit extensions but is not part of the original LFS proposal. The reason for this is simple: it is not necessary. The necessity for a ‘glob64’ function is added by the extensions of the GNU ‘glob’ implementation which allows the user to provide their own directory handling and ‘stat’ functions. The ‘readdir’ and ‘stat’ functions do depend on the choice of ‘_FILE_OFFSET_BITS’ since the definition of the types ‘struct dirent’ and ‘struct stat’ will change depending on the choice. Besides this difference, ‘glob64’ works just like ‘glob’ in all aspects. This function is a GNU extension.  File: libc.info, Node: Flags for Globbing, Next: More Flags for Globbing, Prev: Calling Glob, Up: Globbing 10.2.2 Flags for Globbing ------------------------- This section describes the standard flags that you can specify in the FLAGS argument to ‘glob’. Choose the flags you want, and combine them with the C bitwise OR operator ‘|’. Note that there are *note More Flags for Globbing:: available as GNU extensions. ‘GLOB_APPEND’ Append the words from this expansion to the vector of words produced by previous calls to ‘glob’. This way you can effectively expand several words as if they were concatenated with spaces between them. In order for appending to work, you must not modify the contents of the word vector structure between calls to ‘glob’. And, if you set ‘GLOB_DOOFFS’ in the first call to ‘glob’, you must also set it when you append to the results. Note that the pointer stored in ‘gl_pathv’ may no longer be valid after you call ‘glob’ the second time, because ‘glob’ might have relocated the vector. So always fetch ‘gl_pathv’ from the ‘glob_t’ structure after each ‘glob’ call; *never* save the pointer across calls. ‘GLOB_DOOFFS’ Leave blank slots at the beginning of the vector of words. The ‘gl_offs’ field says how many slots to leave. The blank slots contain null pointers. ‘GLOB_ERR’ Give up right away and report an error if there is any difficulty reading the directories that must be read in order to expand PATTERN fully. Such difficulties might include a directory in which you don’t have the requisite access. Normally, ‘glob’ tries its best to keep on going despite any errors, reading whatever directories it can. You can exercise even more control than this by specifying an error-handler function ERRFUNC when you call ‘glob’. If ERRFUNC is not a null pointer, then ‘glob’ doesn’t give up right away when it can’t read a directory; instead, it calls ERRFUNC with two arguments, like this: (*ERRFUNC) (FILENAME, ERROR-CODE) The argument FILENAME is the name of the directory that ‘glob’ couldn’t open or couldn’t read, and ERROR-CODE is the ‘errno’ value that was reported to ‘glob’. If the error handler function returns nonzero, then ‘glob’ gives up right away. Otherwise, it continues. ‘GLOB_MARK’ If the pattern matches the name of a directory, append ‘/’ to the directory’s name when returning it. ‘GLOB_NOCHECK’ If the pattern doesn’t match any file names, return the pattern itself as if it were a file name that had been matched. (Normally, when the pattern doesn’t match anything, ‘glob’ returns that there were no matches.) ‘GLOB_NOESCAPE’ Don’t treat the ‘\’ character specially in patterns. Normally, ‘\’ quotes the following character, turning off its special meaning (if any) so that it matches only itself. When quoting is enabled, the pattern ‘\?’ matches only the string ‘?’, because the question mark in the pattern acts like an ordinary character. If you use ‘GLOB_NOESCAPE’, then ‘\’ is an ordinary character. ‘glob’ does its work by calling the function ‘fnmatch’ repeatedly. It handles the flag ‘GLOB_NOESCAPE’ by turning on the ‘FNM_NOESCAPE’ flag in calls to ‘fnmatch’. ‘GLOB_NOSORT’ Don’t sort the file names; return them in no particular order. (In practice, the order will depend on the order of the entries in the directory.) The only reason _not_ to sort is to save time.  File: libc.info, Node: More Flags for Globbing, Prev: Flags for Globbing, Up: Globbing 10.2.3 More Flags for Globbing ------------------------------ Beside the flags described in the last section, the GNU implementation of ‘glob’ allows a few more flags which are also defined in the ‘glob.h’ file. Some of the extensions implement functionality which is available in modern shell implementations. ‘GLOB_PERIOD’ The ‘.’ character (period) is treated special. It cannot be matched by wildcards. *Note Wildcard Matching::, ‘FNM_PERIOD’. ‘GLOB_MAGCHAR’ The ‘GLOB_MAGCHAR’ value is not to be given to ‘glob’ in the FLAGS parameter. Instead, ‘glob’ sets this bit in the GL_FLAGS element of the GLOB_T structure provided as the result if the pattern used for matching contains any wildcard character. ‘GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC’ Instead of using the normal functions for accessing the filesystem the ‘glob’ implementation uses the user-supplied functions specified in the structure pointed to by PGLOB parameter. For more information about the functions refer to the sections about directory handling see *note Accessing Directories::, and *note Reading Attributes::. ‘GLOB_BRACE’ If this flag is given, the handling of braces in the pattern is changed. It is now required that braces appear correctly grouped. I.e., for each opening brace there must be a closing one. Braces can be used recursively. So it is possible to define one brace expression in another one. It is important to note that the range of each brace expression is completely contained in the outer brace expression (if there is one). The string between the matching braces is separated into single expressions by splitting at ‘,’ (comma) characters. The commas themselves are discarded. Please note what we said above about recursive brace expressions. The commas used to separate the subexpressions must be at the same level. Commas in brace subexpressions are not matched. They are used during expansion of the brace expression of the deeper level. The example below shows this glob ("{foo/{,bar,biz},baz}", GLOB_BRACE, NULL, &result) is equivalent to the sequence glob ("foo/", GLOB_BRACE, NULL, &result) glob ("foo/bar", GLOB_BRACE|GLOB_APPEND, NULL, &result) glob ("foo/biz", GLOB_BRACE|GLOB_APPEND, NULL, &result) glob ("baz", GLOB_BRACE|GLOB_APPEND, NULL, &result) if we leave aside error handling. ‘GLOB_NOMAGIC’ If the pattern contains no wildcard constructs (it is a literal file name), return it as the sole “matching” word, even if no file exists by that name. ‘GLOB_TILDE’ If this flag is used the character ‘~’ (tilde) is handled specially if it appears at the beginning of the pattern. Instead of being taken verbatim it is used to represent the home directory of a known user. If ‘~’ is the only character in pattern or it is followed by a ‘/’ (slash), the home directory of the process owner is substituted. Using ‘getlogin’ and ‘getpwnam’ the information is read from the system databases. As an example take user ‘bart’ with his home directory at ‘/home/bart’. For him a call like glob ("~/bin/*", GLOB_TILDE, NULL, &result) would return the contents of the directory ‘/home/bart/bin’. Instead of referring to the own home directory it is also possible to name the home directory of other users. To do so one has to append the user name after the tilde character. So the contents of user ‘homer’’s ‘bin’ directory can be retrieved by glob ("~homer/bin/*", GLOB_TILDE, NULL, &result) If the user name is not valid or the home directory cannot be determined for some reason the pattern is left untouched and itself used as the result. I.e., if in the last example ‘home’ is not available the tilde expansion yields to ‘"~homer/bin/*"’ and ‘glob’ is not looking for a directory named ‘~homer’. This functionality is equivalent to what is available in C-shells if the ‘nonomatch’ flag is set. ‘GLOB_TILDE_CHECK’ If this flag is used ‘glob’ behaves as if ‘GLOB_TILDE’ is given. The only difference is that if the user name is not available or the home directory cannot be determined for other reasons this leads to an error. ‘glob’ will return ‘GLOB_NOMATCH’ instead of using the pattern itself as the name. This functionality is equivalent to what is available in C-shells if the ‘nonomatch’ flag is not set. ‘GLOB_ONLYDIR’ If this flag is used the globbing function takes this as a *hint* that the caller is only interested in directories matching the pattern. If the information about the type of the file is easily available non-directories will be rejected but no extra work will be done to determine the information for each file. I.e., the caller must still be able to filter directories out. This functionality is only available with the GNU ‘glob’ implementation. It is mainly used internally to increase the performance but might be useful for a user as well and therefore is documented here. Calling ‘glob’ will in most cases allocate resources which are used to represent the result of the function call. If the same object of type ‘glob_t’ is used in multiple call to ‘glob’ the resources are freed or reused so that no leaks appear. But this does not include the time when all ‘glob’ calls are done. -- Function: void globfree (glob_t *PGLOB) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘globfree’ function frees all resources allocated by previous calls to ‘glob’ associated with the object pointed to by PGLOB. This function should be called whenever the currently used ‘glob_t’ typed object isn’t used anymore. -- Function: void globfree64 (glob64_t *PGLOB) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt lock | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function is equivalent to ‘globfree’ but it frees records of type ‘glob64_t’ which were allocated by ‘glob64’.  File: libc.info, Node: Regular Expressions, Next: Word Expansion, Prev: Globbing, Up: Pattern Matching 10.3 Regular Expression Matching ================================ The GNU C Library supports two interfaces for matching regular expressions. One is the standard POSIX.2 interface, and the other is what the GNU C Library has had for many years. Both interfaces are declared in the header file ‘regex.h’. If you define ‘_POSIX_C_SOURCE’, then only the POSIX.2 functions, structures, and constants are declared. * Menu: * POSIX Regexp Compilation:: Using ‘regcomp’ to prepare to match. * Flags for POSIX Regexps:: Syntax variations for ‘regcomp’. * Matching POSIX Regexps:: Using ‘regexec’ to match the compiled pattern that you get from ‘regcomp’. * Regexp Subexpressions:: Finding which parts of the string were matched. * Subexpression Complications:: Find points of which parts were matched. * Regexp Cleanup:: Freeing storage; reporting errors.  File: libc.info, Node: POSIX Regexp Compilation, Next: Flags for POSIX Regexps, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.1 POSIX Regular Expression Compilation ------------------------------------------- Before you can actually match a regular expression, you must “compile” it. This is not true compilation—it produces a special data structure, not machine instructions. But it is like ordinary compilation in that its purpose is to enable you to “execute” the pattern fast. (*Note Matching POSIX Regexps::, for how to use the compiled regular expression for matching.) There is a special data type for compiled regular expressions: -- Data Type: regex_t This type of object holds a compiled regular expression. It is actually a structure. It has just one field that your programs should look at: ‘re_nsub’ This field holds the number of parenthetical subexpressions in the regular expression that was compiled. There are several other fields, but we don’t describe them here, because only the functions in the library should use them. After you create a ‘regex_t’ object, you can compile a regular expression into it by calling ‘regcomp’. -- Function: int regcomp (regex_t *restrict COMPILED, const char *restrict PATTERN, int CFLAGS) Preliminary: | MT-Safe locale | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock mem fd | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The function ‘regcomp’ “compiles” a regular expression into a data structure that you can use with ‘regexec’ to match against a string. The compiled regular expression format is designed for efficient matching. ‘regcomp’ stores it into ‘*COMPILED’. It’s up to you to allocate an object of type ‘regex_t’ and pass its address to ‘regcomp’. The argument CFLAGS lets you specify various options that control the syntax and semantics of regular expressions. *Note Flags for POSIX Regexps::. If you use the flag ‘REG_NOSUB’, then ‘regcomp’ omits from the compiled regular expression the information necessary to record how subexpressions actually match. In this case, you might as well pass ‘0’ for the MATCHPTR and NMATCH arguments when you call ‘regexec’. If you don’t use ‘REG_NOSUB’, then the compiled regular expression does have the capacity to record how subexpressions match. Also, ‘regcomp’ tells you how many subexpressions PATTERN has, by storing the number in ‘COMPILED->re_nsub’. You can use that value to decide how long an array to allocate to hold information about subexpression matches. ‘regcomp’ returns ‘0’ if it succeeds in compiling the regular expression; otherwise, it returns a nonzero error code (see the table below). You can use ‘regerror’ to produce an error message string describing the reason for a nonzero value; see *note Regexp Cleanup::. Here are the possible nonzero values that ‘regcomp’ can return: ‘REG_BADBR’ There was an invalid ‘\{...\}’ construct in the regular expression. A valid ‘\{...\}’ construct must contain either a single number, or two numbers in increasing order separated by a comma. ‘REG_BADPAT’ There was a syntax error in the regular expression. ‘REG_BADRPT’ A repetition operator such as ‘?’ or ‘*’ appeared in a bad position (with no preceding subexpression to act on). ‘REG_ECOLLATE’ The regular expression referred to an invalid collating element (one not defined in the current locale for string collation). *Note Locale Categories::. ‘REG_ECTYPE’ The regular expression referred to an invalid character class name. ‘REG_EESCAPE’ The regular expression ended with ‘\’. ‘REG_ESUBREG’ There was an invalid number in the ‘\DIGIT’ construct. ‘REG_EBRACK’ There were unbalanced square brackets in the regular expression. ‘REG_EPAREN’ An extended regular expression had unbalanced parentheses, or a basic regular expression had unbalanced ‘\(’ and ‘\)’. ‘REG_EBRACE’ The regular expression had unbalanced ‘\{’ and ‘\}’. ‘REG_ERANGE’ One of the endpoints in a range expression was invalid. ‘REG_ESPACE’ ‘regcomp’ ran out of memory.  File: libc.info, Node: Flags for POSIX Regexps, Next: Matching POSIX Regexps, Prev: POSIX Regexp Compilation, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.2 Flags for POSIX Regular Expressions ------------------------------------------ These are the bit flags that you can use in the CFLAGS operand when compiling a regular expression with ‘regcomp’. ‘REG_EXTENDED’ Treat the pattern as an extended regular expression, rather than as a basic regular expression. ‘REG_ICASE’ Ignore case when matching letters. ‘REG_NOSUB’ Don’t bother storing the contents of the MATCHPTR array. ‘REG_NEWLINE’ Treat a newline in STRING as dividing STRING into multiple lines, so that ‘$’ can match before the newline and ‘^’ can match after. Also, don’t permit ‘.’ to match a newline, and don’t permit ‘[^...]’ to match a newline. Otherwise, newline acts like any other ordinary character.  File: libc.info, Node: Matching POSIX Regexps, Next: Regexp Subexpressions, Prev: Flags for POSIX Regexps, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.3 Matching a Compiled POSIX Regular Expression --------------------------------------------------- Once you have compiled a regular expression, as described in *note POSIX Regexp Compilation::, you can match it against strings using ‘regexec’. A match anywhere inside the string counts as success, unless the regular expression contains anchor characters (‘^’ or ‘$’). -- Function: int regexec (const regex_t *restrict COMPILED, const char *restrict STRING, size_t NMATCH, regmatch_t MATCHPTR[restrict], int EFLAGS) Preliminary: | MT-Safe locale | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock mem fd | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function tries to match the compiled regular expression ‘*COMPILED’ against STRING. ‘regexec’ returns ‘0’ if the regular expression matches; otherwise, it returns a nonzero value. See the table below for what nonzero values mean. You can use ‘regerror’ to produce an error message string describing the reason for a nonzero value; see *note Regexp Cleanup::. The argument EFLAGS is a word of bit flags that enable various options. If you want to get information about what part of STRING actually matched the regular expression or its subexpressions, use the arguments MATCHPTR and NMATCH. Otherwise, pass ‘0’ for NMATCH, and ‘NULL’ for MATCHPTR. *Note Regexp Subexpressions::. You must match the regular expression with the same set of current locales that were in effect when you compiled the regular expression. The function ‘regexec’ accepts the following flags in the EFLAGS argument: ‘REG_NOTBOL’ Do not regard the beginning of the specified string as the beginning of a line; more generally, don’t make any assumptions about what text might precede it. ‘REG_NOTEOL’ Do not regard the end of the specified string as the end of a line; more generally, don’t make any assumptions about what text might follow it. Here are the possible nonzero values that ‘regexec’ can return: ‘REG_NOMATCH’ The pattern didn’t match the string. This isn’t really an error. ‘REG_ESPACE’ ‘regexec’ ran out of memory.  File: libc.info, Node: Regexp Subexpressions, Next: Subexpression Complications, Prev: Matching POSIX Regexps, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.4 Match Results with Subexpressions ---------------------------------------- When ‘regexec’ matches parenthetical subexpressions of PATTERN, it records which parts of STRING they match. It returns that information by storing the offsets into an array whose elements are structures of type ‘regmatch_t’. The first element of the array (index ‘0’) records the part of the string that matched the entire regular expression. Each other element of the array records the beginning and end of the part that matched a single parenthetical subexpression. -- Data Type: regmatch_t This is the data type of the MATCHPTR array that you pass to ‘regexec’. It contains two structure fields, as follows: ‘rm_so’ The offset in STRING of the beginning of a substring. Add this value to STRING to get the address of that part. ‘rm_eo’ The offset in STRING of the end of the substring. -- Data Type: regoff_t ‘regoff_t’ is an alias for another signed integer type. The fields of ‘regmatch_t’ have type ‘regoff_t’. The ‘regmatch_t’ elements correspond to subexpressions positionally; the first element (index ‘1’) records where the first subexpression matched, the second element records the second subexpression, and so on. The order of the subexpressions is the order in which they begin. When you call ‘regexec’, you specify how long the MATCHPTR array is, with the NMATCH argument. This tells ‘regexec’ how many elements to store. If the actual regular expression has more than NMATCH subexpressions, then you won’t get offset information about the rest of them. But this doesn’t alter whether the pattern matches a particular string or not. If you don’t want ‘regexec’ to return any information about where the subexpressions matched, you can either supply ‘0’ for NMATCH, or use the flag ‘REG_NOSUB’ when you compile the pattern with ‘regcomp’.  File: libc.info, Node: Subexpression Complications, Next: Regexp Cleanup, Prev: Regexp Subexpressions, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.5 Complications in Subexpression Matching ---------------------------------------------- Sometimes a subexpression matches a substring of no characters. This happens when ‘f\(o*\)’ matches the string ‘fum’. (It really matches just the ‘f’.) In this case, both of the offsets identify the point in the string where the null substring was found. In this example, the offsets are both ‘1’. Sometimes the entire regular expression can match without using some of its subexpressions at all—for example, when ‘ba\(na\)*’ matches the string ‘ba’, the parenthetical subexpression is not used. When this happens, ‘regexec’ stores ‘-1’ in both fields of the element for that subexpression. Sometimes matching the entire regular expression can match a particular subexpression more than once—for example, when ‘ba\(na\)*’ matches the string ‘bananana’, the parenthetical subexpression matches three times. When this happens, ‘regexec’ usually stores the offsets of the last part of the string that matched the subexpression. In the case of ‘bananana’, these offsets are ‘6’ and ‘8’. But the last match is not always the one that is chosen. It’s more accurate to say that the last _opportunity_ to match is the one that takes precedence. What this means is that when one subexpression appears within another, then the results reported for the inner subexpression reflect whatever happened on the last match of the outer subexpression. For an example, consider ‘\(ba\(na\)*s \)*’ matching the string ‘bananas bas ’. The last time the inner expression actually matches is near the end of the first word. But it is _considered_ again in the second word, and fails to match there. ‘regexec’ reports nonuse of the “na” subexpression. Another place where this rule applies is when the regular expression \(ba\(na\)*s \|nefer\(ti\)* \)* matches ‘bananas nefertiti’. The “na” subexpression does match in the first word, but it doesn’t match in the second word because the other alternative is used there. Once again, the second repetition of the outer subexpression overrides the first, and within that second repetition, the “na” subexpression is not used. So ‘regexec’ reports nonuse of the “na” subexpression.  File: libc.info, Node: Regexp Cleanup, Prev: Subexpression Complications, Up: Regular Expressions 10.3.6 POSIX Regexp Matching Cleanup ------------------------------------ When you are finished using a compiled regular expression, you can free the storage it uses by calling ‘regfree’. -- Function: void regfree (regex_t *COMPILED) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap | AC-Unsafe mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. Calling ‘regfree’ frees all the storage that ‘*COMPILED’ points to. This includes various internal fields of the ‘regex_t’ structure that aren’t documented in this manual. ‘regfree’ does not free the object ‘*COMPILED’ itself. You should always free the space in a ‘regex_t’ structure with ‘regfree’ before using the structure to compile another regular expression. When ‘regcomp’ or ‘regexec’ reports an error, you can use the function ‘regerror’ to turn it into an error message string. -- Function: size_t regerror (int ERRCODE, const regex_t *restrict COMPILED, char *restrict BUFFER, size_t LENGTH) Preliminary: | MT-Safe env | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap lock dlopen | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function produces an error message string for the error code ERRCODE, and stores the string in LENGTH bytes of memory starting at BUFFER. For the COMPILED argument, supply the same compiled regular expression structure that ‘regcomp’ or ‘regexec’ was working with when it got the error. Alternatively, you can supply ‘NULL’ for COMPILED; you will still get a meaningful error message, but it might not be as detailed. If the error message can’t fit in LENGTH bytes (including a terminating null character), then ‘regerror’ truncates it. The string that ‘regerror’ stores is always null-terminated even if it has been truncated. The return value of ‘regerror’ is the minimum length needed to store the entire error message. If this is less than LENGTH, then the error message was not truncated, and you can use it. Otherwise, you should call ‘regerror’ again with a larger buffer. Here is a function which uses ‘regerror’, but always dynamically allocates a buffer for the error message: char *get_regerror (int errcode, regex_t *compiled) { size_t length = regerror (errcode, compiled, NULL, 0); char *buffer = xmalloc (length); (void) regerror (errcode, compiled, buffer, length); return buffer; }  File: libc.info, Node: Word Expansion, Prev: Regular Expressions, Up: Pattern Matching 10.4 Shell-Style Word Expansion =============================== “Word expansion” means the process of splitting a string into “words” and substituting for variables, commands, and wildcards just as the shell does. For example, when you write ‘ls -l foo.c’, this string is split into three separate words—‘ls’, ‘-l’ and ‘foo.c’. This is the most basic function of word expansion. When you write ‘ls *.c’, this can become many words, because the word ‘*.c’ can be replaced with any number of file names. This is called “wildcard expansion”, and it is also a part of word expansion. When you use ‘echo $PATH’ to print your path, you are taking advantage of “variable substitution”, which is also part of word expansion. Ordinary programs can perform word expansion just like the shell by calling the library function ‘wordexp’. * Menu: * Expansion Stages:: What word expansion does to a string. * Calling Wordexp:: How to call ‘wordexp’. * Flags for Wordexp:: Options you can enable in ‘wordexp’. * Wordexp Example:: A sample program that does word expansion. * Tilde Expansion:: Details of how tilde expansion works. * Variable Substitution:: Different types of variable substitution.  File: libc.info, Node: Expansion Stages, Next: Calling Wordexp, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.1 The Stages of Word Expansion ----------------------------------- When word expansion is applied to a sequence of words, it performs the following transformations in the order shown here: 1. “Tilde expansion”: Replacement of ‘~foo’ with the name of the home directory of ‘foo’. 2. Next, three different transformations are applied in the same step, from left to right: • “Variable substitution”: Environment variables are substituted for references such as ‘$foo’. • “Command substitution”: Constructs such as ‘`cat foo`’ and the equivalent ‘$(cat foo)’ are replaced with the output from the inner command. • “Arithmetic expansion”: Constructs such as ‘$(($x-1))’ are replaced with the result of the arithmetic computation. 3. “Field splitting”: subdivision of the text into “words”. 4. “Wildcard expansion”: The replacement of a construct such as ‘*.c’ with a list of ‘.c’ file names. Wildcard expansion applies to an entire word at a time, and replaces that word with 0 or more file names that are themselves words. 5. “Quote removal”: The deletion of string-quotes, now that they have done their job by inhibiting the above transformations when appropriate. For the details of these transformations, and how to write the constructs that use them, see ‘The BASH Manual’ (to appear).  File: libc.info, Node: Calling Wordexp, Next: Flags for Wordexp, Prev: Expansion Stages, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.2 Calling ‘wordexp’ ------------------------ All the functions, constants and data types for word expansion are declared in the header file ‘wordexp.h’. Word expansion produces a vector of words (strings). To return this vector, ‘wordexp’ uses a special data type, ‘wordexp_t’, which is a structure. You pass ‘wordexp’ the address of the structure, and it fills in the structure’s fields to tell you about the results. -- Data Type: wordexp_t This data type holds a pointer to a word vector. More precisely, it records both the address of the word vector and its size. ‘we_wordc’ The number of elements in the vector. ‘we_wordv’ The address of the vector. This field has type ‘char **’. ‘we_offs’ The offset of the first real element of the vector, from its nominal address in the ‘we_wordv’ field. Unlike the other fields, this is always an input to ‘wordexp’, rather than an output from it. If you use a nonzero offset, then that many elements at the beginning of the vector are left empty. (The ‘wordexp’ function fills them with null pointers.) The ‘we_offs’ field is meaningful only if you use the ‘WRDE_DOOFFS’ flag. Otherwise, the offset is always zero regardless of what is in this field, and the first real element comes at the beginning of the vector. -- Function: int wordexp (const char *WORDS, wordexp_t *WORD-VECTOR-PTR, int FLAGS) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:utent const:env env sig:ALRM timer locale | AS-Unsafe dlopen plugin i18n heap corrupt lock | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock fd mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. Perform word expansion on the string WORDS, putting the result in a newly allocated vector, and store the size and address of this vector into ‘*WORD-VECTOR-PTR’. The argument FLAGS is a combination of bit flags; see *note Flags for Wordexp::, for details of the flags. You shouldn’t use any of the characters ‘|&;<>’ in the string WORDS unless they are quoted; likewise for newline. If you use these characters unquoted, you will get the ‘WRDE_BADCHAR’ error code. Don’t use parentheses or braces unless they are quoted or part of a word expansion construct. If you use quotation characters ‘'"`’, they should come in pairs that balance. The results of word expansion are a sequence of words. The function ‘wordexp’ allocates a string for each resulting word, then allocates a vector of type ‘char **’ to store the addresses of these strings. The last element of the vector is a null pointer. This vector is called the “word vector”. To return this vector, ‘wordexp’ stores both its address and its length (number of elements, not counting the terminating null pointer) into ‘*WORD-VECTOR-PTR’. If ‘wordexp’ succeeds, it returns 0. Otherwise, it returns one of these error codes: ‘WRDE_BADCHAR’ The input string WORDS contains an unquoted invalid character such as ‘|’. ‘WRDE_BADVAL’ The input string refers to an undefined shell variable, and you used the flag ‘WRDE_UNDEF’ to forbid such references. ‘WRDE_CMDSUB’ The input string uses command substitution, and you used the flag ‘WRDE_NOCMD’ to forbid command substitution. ‘WRDE_NOSPACE’ It was impossible to allocate memory to hold the result. In this case, ‘wordexp’ can store part of the results—as much as it could allocate room for. ‘WRDE_SYNTAX’ There was a syntax error in the input string. For example, an unmatched quoting character is a syntax error. This error code is also used to signal division by zero and overflow in arithmetic expansion. -- Function: void wordfree (wordexp_t *WORD-VECTOR-PTR) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap | AC-Unsafe corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. Free the storage used for the word-strings and vector that ‘*WORD-VECTOR-PTR’ points to. This does not free the structure ‘*WORD-VECTOR-PTR’ itself—only the other data it points to.  File: libc.info, Node: Flags for Wordexp, Next: Wordexp Example, Prev: Calling Wordexp, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.3 Flags for Word Expansion ------------------------------- This section describes the flags that you can specify in the FLAGS argument to ‘wordexp’. Choose the flags you want, and combine them with the C operator ‘|’. ‘WRDE_APPEND’ Append the words from this expansion to the vector of words produced by previous calls to ‘wordexp’. This way you can effectively expand several words as if they were concatenated with spaces between them. In order for appending to work, you must not modify the contents of the word vector structure between calls to ‘wordexp’. And, if you set ‘WRDE_DOOFFS’ in the first call to ‘wordexp’, you must also set it when you append to the results. ‘WRDE_DOOFFS’ Leave blank slots at the beginning of the vector of words. The ‘we_offs’ field says how many slots to leave. The blank slots contain null pointers. ‘WRDE_NOCMD’ Don’t do command substitution; if the input requests command substitution, report an error. ‘WRDE_REUSE’ Reuse a word vector made by a previous call to ‘wordexp’. Instead of allocating a new vector of words, this call to ‘wordexp’ will use the vector that already exists (making it larger if necessary). Note that the vector may move, so it is not safe to save an old pointer and use it again after calling ‘wordexp’. You must fetch ‘we_pathv’ anew after each call. ‘WRDE_SHOWERR’ Do show any error messages printed by commands run by command substitution. More precisely, allow these commands to inherit the standard error output stream of the current process. By default, ‘wordexp’ gives these commands a standard error stream that discards all output. ‘WRDE_UNDEF’ If the input refers to a shell variable that is not defined, report an error.  File: libc.info, Node: Wordexp Example, Next: Tilde Expansion, Prev: Flags for Wordexp, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.4 ‘wordexp’ Example ------------------------ Here is an example of using ‘wordexp’ to expand several strings and use the results to run a shell command. It also shows the use of ‘WRDE_APPEND’ to concatenate the expansions and of ‘wordfree’ to free the space allocated by ‘wordexp’. int expand_and_execute (const char *program, const char **options) { wordexp_t result; pid_t pid int status, i; /* Expand the string for the program to run. */ switch (wordexp (program, &result, 0)) { case 0: /* Successful. */ break; case WRDE_NOSPACE: /* If the error was ‘WRDE_NOSPACE’, then perhaps part of the result was allocated. */ wordfree (&result); default: /* Some other error. */ return -1; } /* Expand the strings specified for the arguments. */ for (i = 0; options[i] != NULL; i++) { if (wordexp (options[i], &result, WRDE_APPEND)) { wordfree (&result); return -1; } } pid = fork (); if (pid == 0) { /* This is the child process. Execute the command. */ execv (result.we_wordv[0], result.we_wordv); exit (EXIT_FAILURE); } else if (pid < 0) /* The fork failed. Report failure. */ status = -1; else /* This is the parent process. Wait for the child to complete. */ if (waitpid (pid, &status, 0) != pid) status = -1; wordfree (&result); return status; }  File: libc.info, Node: Tilde Expansion, Next: Variable Substitution, Prev: Wordexp Example, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.5 Details of Tilde Expansion --------------------------------- It’s a standard part of shell syntax that you can use ‘~’ at the beginning of a file name to stand for your own home directory. You can use ‘~USER’ to stand for USER’s home directory. “Tilde expansion” is the process of converting these abbreviations to the directory names that they stand for. Tilde expansion applies to the ‘~’ plus all following characters up to whitespace or a slash. It takes place only at the beginning of a word, and only if none of the characters to be transformed is quoted in any way. Plain ‘~’ uses the value of the environment variable ‘HOME’ as the proper home directory name. ‘~’ followed by a user name uses ‘getpwname’ to look up that user in the user database, and uses whatever directory is recorded there. Thus, ‘~’ followed by your own name can give different results from plain ‘~’, if the value of ‘HOME’ is not really your home directory.  File: libc.info, Node: Variable Substitution, Prev: Tilde Expansion, Up: Word Expansion 10.4.6 Details of Variable Substitution --------------------------------------- Part of ordinary shell syntax is the use of ‘$VARIABLE’ to substitute the value of a shell variable into a command. This is called “variable substitution”, and it is one part of doing word expansion. There are two basic ways you can write a variable reference for substitution: ‘${VARIABLE}’ If you write braces around the variable name, then it is completely unambiguous where the variable name ends. You can concatenate additional letters onto the end of the variable value by writing them immediately after the close brace. For example, ‘${foo}s’ expands into ‘tractors’. ‘$VARIABLE’ If you do not put braces around the variable name, then the variable name consists of all the alphanumeric characters and underscores that follow the ‘$’. The next punctuation character ends the variable name. Thus, ‘$foo-bar’ refers to the variable ‘foo’ and expands into ‘tractor-bar’. When you use braces, you can also use various constructs to modify the value that is substituted, or test it in various ways. ‘${VARIABLE:-DEFAULT}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but if that is empty or undefined, use DEFAULT instead. ‘${VARIABLE:=DEFAULT}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but if that is empty or undefined, use DEFAULT instead and set the variable to DEFAULT. ‘${VARIABLE:?MESSAGE}’ If VARIABLE is defined and not empty, substitute its value. Otherwise, print MESSAGE as an error message on the standard error stream, and consider word expansion a failure. ‘${VARIABLE:+REPLACEMENT}’ Substitute REPLACEMENT, but only if VARIABLE is defined and nonempty. Otherwise, substitute nothing for this construct. ‘${#VARIABLE}’ Substitute a numeral which expresses in base ten the number of characters in the value of VARIABLE. ‘${#foo}’ stands for ‘7’, because ‘tractor’ is seven characters. These variants of variable substitution let you remove part of the variable’s value before substituting it. The PREFIX and SUFFIX are not mere strings; they are wildcard patterns, just like the patterns that you use to match multiple file names. But in this context, they match against parts of the variable value rather than against file names. ‘${VARIABLE%%SUFFIX}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but first discard from that variable any portion at the end that matches the pattern SUFFIX. If there is more than one alternative for how to match against SUFFIX, this construct uses the longest possible match. Thus, ‘${foo%%r*}’ substitutes ‘t’, because the largest match for ‘r*’ at the end of ‘tractor’ is ‘ractor’. ‘${VARIABLE%SUFFIX}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but first discard from that variable any portion at the end that matches the pattern SUFFIX. If there is more than one alternative for how to match against SUFFIX, this construct uses the shortest possible alternative. Thus, ‘${foo%r*}’ substitutes ‘tracto’, because the shortest match for ‘r*’ at the end of ‘tractor’ is just ‘r’. ‘${VARIABLE##PREFIX}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but first discard from that variable any portion at the beginning that matches the pattern PREFIX. If there is more than one alternative for how to match against PREFIX, this construct uses the longest possible match. Thus, ‘${foo##*t}’ substitutes ‘or’, because the largest match for ‘*t’ at the beginning of ‘tractor’ is ‘tract’. ‘${VARIABLE#PREFIX}’ Substitute the value of VARIABLE, but first discard from that variable any portion at the beginning that matches the pattern PREFIX. If there is more than one alternative for how to match against PREFIX, this construct uses the shortest possible alternative. Thus, ‘${foo#*t}’ substitutes ‘ractor’, because the shortest match for ‘*t’ at the beginning of ‘tractor’ is just ‘t’.  File: libc.info, Node: I/O Overview, Next: I/O on Streams, Prev: Pattern Matching, Up: Top 11 Input/Output Overview ************************ Most programs need to do either input (reading data) or output (writing data), or most frequently both, in order to do anything useful. The GNU C Library provides such a large selection of input and output functions that the hardest part is often deciding which function is most appropriate! This chapter introduces concepts and terminology relating to input and output. Other chapters relating to the GNU I/O facilities are: • *note I/O on Streams::, which covers the high-level functions that operate on streams, including formatted input and output. • *note Low-Level I/O::, which covers the basic I/O and control functions on file descriptors. • *note File System Interface::, which covers functions for operating on directories and for manipulating file attributes such as access modes and ownership. • *note Pipes and FIFOs::, which includes information on the basic interprocess communication facilities. • *note Sockets::, which covers a more complicated interprocess communication facility with support for networking. • *note Low-Level Terminal Interface::, which covers functions for changing how input and output to terminals or other serial devices are processed. * Menu: * I/O Concepts:: Some basic information and terminology. * File Names:: How to refer to a file.  File: libc.info, Node: I/O Concepts, Next: File Names, Up: I/O Overview 11.1 Input/Output Concepts ========================== Before you can read or write the contents of a file, you must establish a connection or communications channel to the file. This process is called “opening” the file. You can open a file for reading, writing, or both. The connection to an open file is represented either as a stream or as a file descriptor. You pass this as an argument to the functions that do the actual read or write operations, to tell them which file to operate on. Certain functions expect streams, and others are designed to operate on file descriptors. When you have finished reading to or writing from the file, you can terminate the connection by “closing” the file. Once you have closed a stream or file descriptor, you cannot do any more input or output operations on it. * Menu: * Streams and File Descriptors:: The GNU C Library provides two ways to access the contents of files. * File Position:: The number of bytes from the beginning of the file.  File: libc.info, Node: Streams and File Descriptors, Next: File Position, Up: I/O Concepts 11.1.1 Streams and File Descriptors ----------------------------------- When you want to do input or output to a file, you have a choice of two basic mechanisms for representing the connection between your program and the file: file descriptors and streams. File descriptors are represented as objects of type ‘int’, while streams are represented as ‘FILE *’ objects. File descriptors provide a primitive, low-level interface to input and output operations. Both file descriptors and streams can represent a connection to a device (such as a terminal), or a pipe or socket for communicating with another process, as well as a normal file. But, if you want to do control operations that are specific to a particular kind of device, you must use a file descriptor; there are no facilities to use streams in this way. You must also use file descriptors if your program needs to do input or output in special modes, such as nonblocking (or polled) input (*note File Status Flags::). Streams provide a higher-level interface, layered on top of the primitive file descriptor facilities. The stream interface treats all kinds of files pretty much alike—the sole exception being the three styles of buffering that you can choose (*note Stream Buffering::). The main advantage of using the stream interface is that the set of functions for performing actual input and output operations (as opposed to control operations) on streams is much richer and more powerful than the corresponding facilities for file descriptors. The file descriptor interface provides only simple functions for transferring blocks of characters, but the stream interface also provides powerful formatted input and output functions (‘printf’ and ‘scanf’) as well as functions for character- and line-oriented input and output. Since streams are implemented in terms of file descriptors, you can extract the file descriptor from a stream and perform low-level operations directly on the file descriptor. You can also initially open a connection as a file descriptor and then make a stream associated with that file descriptor. In general, you should stick with using streams rather than file descriptors, unless there is some specific operation you want to do that can only be done on a file descriptor. If you are a beginning programmer and aren’t sure what functions to use, we suggest that you concentrate on the formatted input functions (*note Formatted Input::) and formatted output functions (*note Formatted Output::). If you are concerned about portability of your programs to systems other than GNU, you should also be aware that file descriptors are not as portable as streams. You can expect any system running ISO C to support streams, but non-GNU systems may not support file descriptors at all, or may only implement a subset of the GNU functions that operate on file descriptors. Most of the file descriptor functions in the GNU C Library are included in the POSIX.1 standard, however.  File: libc.info, Node: File Position, Prev: Streams and File Descriptors, Up: I/O Concepts 11.1.2 File Position -------------------- One of the attributes of an open file is its “file position” that keeps track of where in the file the next character is to be read or written. On GNU systems, and all POSIX.1 systems, the file position is simply an integer representing the number of bytes from the beginning of the file. The file position is normally set to the beginning of the file when it is opened, and each time a character is read or written, the file position is incremented. In other words, access to the file is normally “sequential”. Ordinary files permit read or write operations at any position within the file. Some other kinds of files may also permit this. Files which do permit this are sometimes referred to as “random-access” files. You can change the file position using the ‘fseek’ function on a stream (*note File Positioning::) or the ‘lseek’ function on a file descriptor (*note I/O Primitives::). If you try to change the file position on a file that doesn’t support random access, you get the ‘ESPIPE’ error. Streams and descriptors that are opened for “append access” are treated specially for output: output to such files is _always_ appended sequentially to the _end_ of the file, regardless of the file position. However, the file position is still used to control where in the file reading is done. If you think about it, you’ll realize that several programs can read a given file at the same time. In order for each program to be able to read the file at its own pace, each program must have its own file pointer, which is not affected by anything the other programs do. In fact, each opening of a file creates a separate file position. Thus, if you open a file twice even in the same program, you get two streams or descriptors with independent file positions. By contrast, if you open a descriptor and then duplicate it to get another descriptor, these two descriptors share the same file position: changing the file position of one descriptor will affect the other.  File: libc.info, Node: File Names, Prev: I/O Concepts, Up: I/O Overview 11.2 File Names =============== In order to open a connection to a file, or to perform other operations such as deleting a file, you need some way to refer to the file. Nearly all files have names that are strings—even files which are actually devices such as tape drives or terminals. These strings are called “file names”. You specify the file name to say which file you want to open or operate on. This section describes the conventions for file names and how the operating system works with them. * Menu: * Directories:: Directories contain entries for files. * File Name Resolution:: A file name specifies how to look up a file. * File Name Errors:: Error conditions relating to file names. * File Name Portability:: File name portability and syntax issues.  File: libc.info, Node: Directories, Next: File Name Resolution, Up: File Names 11.2.1 Directories ------------------ In order to understand the syntax of file names, you need to understand how the file system is organized into a hierarchy of directories. A “directory” is a file that contains information to associate other files with names; these associations are called “links” or “directory entries”. Sometimes, people speak of “files in a directory”, but in reality, a directory only contains pointers to files, not the files themselves. The name of a file contained in a directory entry is called a “file name component”. In general, a file name consists of a sequence of one or more such components, separated by the slash character (‘/’). A file name which is just one component names a file with respect to its directory. A file name with multiple components names a directory, and then a file in that directory, and so on. Some other documents, such as the POSIX standard, use the term “pathname” for what we call a file name, and either “filename” or “pathname component” for what this manual calls a file name component. We don’t use this terminology because a “path” is something completely different (a list of directories to search), and we think that “pathname” used for something else will confuse users. We always use “file name” and “file name component” (or sometimes just “component”, where the context is obvious) in GNU documentation. Some macros use the POSIX terminology in their names, such as ‘PATH_MAX’. These macros are defined by the POSIX standard, so we cannot change their names. You can find more detailed information about operations on directories in *note File System Interface::.  File: libc.info, Node: File Name Resolution, Next: File Name Errors, Prev: Directories, Up: File Names 11.2.2 File Name Resolution --------------------------- A file name consists of file name components separated by slash (‘/’) characters. On the systems that the GNU C Library supports, multiple successive ‘/’ characters are equivalent to a single ‘/’ character. The process of determining what file a file name refers to is called “file name resolution”. This is performed by examining the components that make up a file name in left-to-right order, and locating each successive component in the directory named by the previous component. Of course, each of the files that are referenced as directories must actually exist, be directories instead of regular files, and have the appropriate permissions to be accessible by the process; otherwise the file name resolution fails. If a file name begins with a ‘/’, the first component in the file name is located in the “root directory” of the process (usually all processes on the system have the same root directory). Such a file name is called an “absolute file name”. Otherwise, the first component in the file name is located in the current working directory (*note Working Directory::). This kind of file name is called a “relative file name”. The file name components ‘.’ (“dot”) and ‘..’ (“dot-dot”) have special meanings. Every directory has entries for these file name components. The file name component ‘.’ refers to the directory itself, while the file name component ‘..’ refers to its “parent directory” (the directory that contains the link for the directory in question). As a special case, ‘..’ in the root directory refers to the root directory itself, since it has no parent; thus ‘/..’ is the same as ‘/’. Here are some examples of file names: ‘/a’ The file named ‘a’, in the root directory. ‘/a/b’ The file named ‘b’, in the directory named ‘a’ in the root directory. ‘a’ The file named ‘a’, in the current working directory. ‘/a/./b’ This is the same as ‘/a/b’. ‘./a’ The file named ‘a’, in the current working directory. ‘../a’ The file named ‘a’, in the parent directory of the current working directory. A file name that names a directory may optionally end in a ‘/’. You can specify a file name of ‘/’ to refer to the root directory, but the empty string is not a meaningful file name. If you want to refer to the current working directory, use a file name of ‘.’ or ‘./’. Unlike some other operating systems, GNU systems don’t have any built-in support for file types (or extensions) or file versions as part of its file name syntax. Many programs and utilities use conventions for file names—for example, files containing C source code usually have names suffixed with ‘.c’—but there is nothing in the file system itself that enforces this kind of convention.  File: libc.info, Node: File Name Errors, Next: File Name Portability, Prev: File Name Resolution, Up: File Names 11.2.3 File Name Errors ----------------------- Functions that accept file name arguments usually detect these ‘errno’ error conditions relating to the file name syntax or trouble finding the named file. These errors are referred to throughout this manual as the “usual file name errors”. ‘EACCES’ The process does not have search permission for a directory component of the file name. ‘ENAMETOOLONG’ This error is used when either the total length of a file name is greater than ‘PATH_MAX’, or when an individual file name component has a length greater than ‘NAME_MAX’. *Note Limits for Files::. On GNU/Hurd systems, there is no imposed limit on overall file name length, but some file systems may place limits on the length of a component. ‘ENOENT’ This error is reported when a file referenced as a directory component in the file name doesn’t exist, or when a component is a symbolic link whose target file does not exist. *Note Symbolic Links::. ‘ENOTDIR’ A file that is referenced as a directory component in the file name exists, but it isn’t a directory. ‘ELOOP’ Too many symbolic links were resolved while trying to look up the file name. The system has an arbitrary limit on the number of symbolic links that may be resolved in looking up a single file name, as a primitive way to detect loops. *Note Symbolic Links::.  File: libc.info, Node: File Name Portability, Prev: File Name Errors, Up: File Names 11.2.4 Portability of File Names -------------------------------- The rules for the syntax of file names discussed in *note File Names::, are the rules normally used by GNU systems and by other POSIX systems. However, other operating systems may use other conventions. There are two reasons why it can be important for you to be aware of file name portability issues: • If your program makes assumptions about file name syntax, or contains embedded literal file name strings, it is more difficult to get it to run under other operating systems that use different syntax conventions. • Even if you are not concerned about running your program on machines that run other operating systems, it may still be possible to access files that use different naming conventions. For example, you may be able to access file systems on another computer running a different operating system over a network, or read and write disks in formats used by other operating systems. The ISO C standard says very little about file name syntax, only that file names are strings. In addition to varying restrictions on the length of file names and what characters can validly appear in a file name, different operating systems use different conventions and syntax for concepts such as structured directories and file types or extensions. Some concepts such as file versions might be supported in some operating systems and not by others. The POSIX.1 standard allows implementations to put additional restrictions on file name syntax, concerning what characters are permitted in file names and on the length of file name and file name component strings. However, on GNU systems, any character except the null character is permitted in a file name string, and on GNU/Hurd systems there are no limits on the length of file name strings.  File: libc.info, Node: I/O on Streams, Next: Low-Level I/O, Prev: I/O Overview, Up: Top 12 Input/Output on Streams ************************** This chapter describes the functions for creating streams and performing input and output operations on them. As discussed in *note I/O Overview::, a stream is a fairly abstract, high-level concept representing a communications channel to a file, device, or process. * Menu: * Streams:: About the data type representing a stream. * Standard Streams:: Streams to the standard input and output devices are created for you. * Opening Streams:: How to create a stream to talk to a file. * Closing Streams:: Close a stream when you are finished with it. * Streams and Threads:: Issues with streams in threaded programs. * Streams and I18N:: Streams in internationalized applications. * Simple Output:: Unformatted output by characters and lines. * Character Input:: Unformatted input by characters and words. * Line Input:: Reading a line or a record from a stream. * Unreading:: Peeking ahead/pushing back input just read. * Block Input/Output:: Input and output operations on blocks of data. * Formatted Output:: ‘printf’ and related functions. * Customizing Printf:: You can define new conversion specifiers for ‘printf’ and friends. * Formatted Input:: ‘scanf’ and related functions. * EOF and Errors:: How you can tell if an I/O error happens. * Error Recovery:: What you can do about errors. * Binary Streams:: Some systems distinguish between text files and binary files. * File Positioning:: About random-access streams. * Portable Positioning:: Random access on peculiar ISO C systems. * Stream Buffering:: How to control buffering of streams. * Other Kinds of Streams:: Streams that do not necessarily correspond to an open file. * Formatted Messages:: Print strictly formatted messages.  File: libc.info, Node: Streams, Next: Standard Streams, Up: I/O on Streams 12.1 Streams ============ For historical reasons, the type of the C data structure that represents a stream is called ‘FILE’ rather than “stream”. Since most of the library functions deal with objects of type ‘FILE *’, sometimes the term “file pointer” is also used to mean “stream”. This leads to unfortunate confusion over terminology in many books on C. This manual, however, is careful to use the terms “file” and “stream” only in the technical sense. The ‘FILE’ type is declared in the header file ‘stdio.h’. -- Data Type: FILE This is the data type used to represent stream objects. A ‘FILE’ object holds all of the internal state information about the connection to the associated file, including such things as the file position indicator and buffering information. Each stream also has error and end-of-file status indicators that can be tested with the ‘ferror’ and ‘feof’ functions; see *note EOF and Errors::. ‘FILE’ objects are allocated and managed internally by the input/output library functions. Don’t try to create your own objects of type ‘FILE’; let the library do it. Your programs should deal only with pointers to these objects (that is, ‘FILE *’ values) rather than the objects themselves.  File: libc.info, Node: Standard Streams, Next: Opening Streams, Prev: Streams, Up: I/O on Streams 12.2 Standard Streams ===================== When the ‘main’ function of your program is invoked, it already has three predefined streams open and available for use. These represent the “standard” input and output channels that have been established for the process. These streams are declared in the header file ‘stdio.h’. -- Variable: FILE * stdin The “standard input” stream, which is the normal source of input for the program. -- Variable: FILE * stdout The “standard output” stream, which is used for normal output from the program. -- Variable: FILE * stderr The “standard error” stream, which is used for error messages and diagnostics issued by the program. On GNU systems, you can specify what files or processes correspond to these streams using the pipe and redirection facilities provided by the shell. (The primitives shells use to implement these facilities are described in *note File System Interface::.) Most other operating systems provide similar mechanisms, but the details of how to use them can vary. In the GNU C Library, ‘stdin’, ‘stdout’, and ‘stderr’ are normal variables which you can set just like any others. For example, to redirect the standard output to a file, you could do: fclose (stdout); stdout = fopen ("standard-output-file", "w"); Note however, that in other systems ‘stdin’, ‘stdout’, and ‘stderr’ are macros that you cannot assign to in the normal way. But you can use ‘freopen’ to get the effect of closing one and reopening it. *Note Opening Streams::. The three streams ‘stdin’, ‘stdout’, and ‘stderr’ are not unoriented at program start (*note Streams and I18N::).  File: libc.info, Node: Opening Streams, Next: Closing Streams, Prev: Standard Streams, Up: I/O on Streams 12.3 Opening Streams ==================== Opening a file with the ‘fopen’ function creates a new stream and establishes a connection between the stream and a file. This may involve creating a new file. Everything described in this section is declared in the header file ‘stdio.h’. -- Function: FILE * fopen (const char *FILENAME, const char *OPENTYPE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap lock | AC-Unsafe mem fd lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fopen’ function opens a stream for I/O to the file FILENAME, and returns a pointer to the stream. The OPENTYPE argument is a string that controls how the file is opened and specifies attributes of the resulting stream. It must begin with one of the following sequences of characters: ‘r’ Open an existing file for reading only. ‘w’ Open the file for writing only. If the file already exists, it is truncated to zero length. Otherwise a new file is created. ‘a’ Open a file for append access; that is, writing at the end of file only. If the file already exists, its initial contents are unchanged and output to the stream is appended to the end of the file. Otherwise, a new, empty file is created. ‘r+’ Open an existing file for both reading and writing. The initial contents of the file are unchanged and the initial file position is at the beginning of the file. ‘w+’ Open a file for both reading and writing. If the file already exists, it is truncated to zero length. Otherwise, a new file is created. ‘a+’ Open or create file for both reading and appending. If the file exists, its initial contents are unchanged. Otherwise, a new file is created. The initial file position for reading is at the beginning of the file, but output is always appended to the end of the file. As you can see, ‘+’ requests a stream that can do both input and output. When using such a stream, you must call ‘fflush’ (*note Stream Buffering::) or a file positioning function such as ‘fseek’ (*note File Positioning::) when switching from reading to writing or vice versa. Otherwise, internal buffers might not be emptied properly. Additional characters may appear after these to specify flags for the call. Always put the mode (‘r’, ‘w+’, etc.) first; that is the only part you are guaranteed will be understood by all systems. The GNU C Library defines additional characters for use in OPENTYPE: ‘c’ The file is opened with cancellation in the I/O functions disabled. ‘e’ The underlying file descriptor will be closed if you use any of the ‘exec...’ functions (*note Executing a File::). (This is equivalent to having set ‘FD_CLOEXEC’ on that descriptor. *Note Descriptor Flags::.) ‘m’ The file is opened and accessed using ‘mmap’. This is only supported with files opened for reading. ‘x’ Insist on creating a new file—if a file FILENAME already exists, ‘fopen’ fails rather than opening it. If you use ‘x’ you are guaranteed that you will not clobber an existing file. This is equivalent to the ‘O_EXCL’ option to the ‘open’ function (*note Opening and Closing Files::). The ‘x’ modifier is part of ISO C11. The character ‘b’ in OPENTYPE has a standard meaning; it requests a binary stream rather than a text stream. But this makes no difference in POSIX systems (including GNU systems). If both ‘+’ and ‘b’ are specified, they can appear in either order. *Note Binary Streams::. If the OPENTYPE string contains the sequence ‘,ccs=STRING’ then STRING is taken as the name of a coded character set and ‘fopen’ will mark the stream as wide-oriented with appropriate conversion functions in place to convert from and to the character set STRING. Any other stream is opened initially unoriented and the orientation is decided with the first file operation. If the first operation is a wide character operation, the stream is not only marked as wide-oriented, also the conversion functions to convert to the coded character set used for the current locale are loaded. This will not change anymore from this point on even if the locale selected for the ‘LC_CTYPE’ category is changed. Any other characters in OPENTYPE are simply ignored. They may be meaningful in other systems. If the open fails, ‘fopen’ returns a null pointer. When the sources are compiled with ‘_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64’ on a 32 bit machine this function is in fact ‘fopen64’ since the LFS interface replaces transparently the old interface. You can have multiple streams (or file descriptors) pointing to the same file open at the same time. If you do only input, this works straightforwardly, but you must be careful if any output streams are included. *Note Stream/Descriptor Precautions::. This is equally true whether the streams are in one program (not usual) or in several programs (which can easily happen). It may be advantageous to use the file locking facilities to avoid simultaneous access. *Note File Locks::. -- Function: FILE * fopen64 (const char *FILENAME, const char *OPENTYPE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap lock | AC-Unsafe mem fd lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function is similar to ‘fopen’ but the stream it returns a pointer for is opened using ‘open64’. Therefore this stream can be used even on files larger than 2^31 bytes on 32 bit machines. Please note that the return type is still ‘FILE *’. There is no special ‘FILE’ type for the LFS interface. If the sources are compiled with ‘_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64’ on a 32 bits machine this function is available under the name ‘fopen’ and so transparently replaces the old interface. -- Macro: int FOPEN_MAX The value of this macro is an integer constant expression that represents the minimum number of streams that the implementation guarantees can be open simultaneously. You might be able to open more than this many streams, but that is not guaranteed. The value of this constant is at least eight, which includes the three standard streams ‘stdin’, ‘stdout’, and ‘stderr’. In POSIX.1 systems this value is determined by the ‘OPEN_MAX’ parameter; *note General Limits::. In BSD and GNU, it is controlled by the ‘RLIMIT_NOFILE’ resource limit; *note Limits on Resources::. -- Function: FILE * freopen (const char *FILENAME, const char *OPENTYPE, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt fd | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function is like a combination of ‘fclose’ and ‘fopen’. It first closes the stream referred to by STREAM, ignoring any errors that are detected in the process. (Because errors are ignored, you should not use ‘freopen’ on an output stream if you have actually done any output using the stream.) Then the file named by FILENAME is opened with mode OPENTYPE as for ‘fopen’, and associated with the same stream object STREAM. If the operation fails, a null pointer is returned; otherwise, ‘freopen’ returns STREAM. On Linux, ‘freopen’ may also fail and set ‘errno’ to ‘EBUSY’ when the kernel structure for the old file descriptor was not initialized completely before ‘freopen’ was called. This can only happen in multi-threaded programs, when two threads race to allocate the same file descriptor number. To avoid the possibility of this race, do not use ‘close’ to close the underlying file descriptor for a ‘FILE’; either use ‘freopen’ while the file is still open, or use ‘open’ and then ‘dup2’ to install the new file descriptor. ‘freopen’ has traditionally been used to connect a standard stream such as ‘stdin’ with a file of your own choice. This is useful in programs in which use of a standard stream for certain purposes is hard-coded. In the GNU C Library, you can simply close the standard streams and open new ones with ‘fopen’. But other systems lack this ability, so using ‘freopen’ is more portable. When the sources are compiled with ‘_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64’ on a 32 bit machine this function is in fact ‘freopen64’ since the LFS interface replaces transparently the old interface. -- Function: FILE * freopen64 (const char *FILENAME, const char *OPENTYPE, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt fd | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function is similar to ‘freopen’. The only difference is that on 32 bit machine the stream returned is able to read beyond the 2^31 bytes limits imposed by the normal interface. It should be noted that the stream pointed to by STREAM need not be opened using ‘fopen64’ or ‘freopen64’ since its mode is not important for this function. If the sources are compiled with ‘_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64’ on a 32 bits machine this function is available under the name ‘freopen’ and so transparently replaces the old interface. In some situations it is useful to know whether a given stream is available for reading or writing. This information is normally not available and would have to be remembered separately. Solaris introduced a few functions to get this information from the stream descriptor and these functions are also available in the GNU C Library. -- Function: int __freadable (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘__freadable’ function determines whether the stream STREAM was opened to allow reading. In this case the return value is nonzero. For write-only streams the function returns zero. This function is declared in ‘stdio_ext.h’. -- Function: int __fwritable (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘__fwritable’ function determines whether the stream STREAM was opened to allow writing. In this case the return value is nonzero. For read-only streams the function returns zero. This function is declared in ‘stdio_ext.h’. For slightly different kinds of problems there are two more functions. They provide even finer-grained information. -- Function: int __freading (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘__freading’ function determines whether the stream STREAM was last read from or whether it is opened read-only. In this case the return value is nonzero, otherwise it is zero. Determining whether a stream opened for reading and writing was last used for writing allows to draw conclusions about the content about the buffer, among other things. This function is declared in ‘stdio_ext.h’. -- Function: int __fwriting (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘__fwriting’ function determines whether the stream STREAM was last written to or whether it is opened write-only. In this case the return value is nonzero, otherwise it is zero. This function is declared in ‘stdio_ext.h’.  File: libc.info, Node: Closing Streams, Next: Streams and Threads, Prev: Opening Streams, Up: I/O on Streams 12.4 Closing Streams ==================== When a stream is closed with ‘fclose’, the connection between the stream and the file is canceled. After you have closed a stream, you cannot perform any additional operations on it. -- Function: int fclose (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe heap lock | AC-Unsafe lock mem fd | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function causes STREAM to be closed and the connection to the corresponding file to be broken. Any buffered output is written and any buffered input is discarded. The ‘fclose’ function returns a value of ‘0’ if the file was closed successfully, and ‘EOF’ if an error was detected. It is important to check for errors when you call ‘fclose’ to close an output stream, because real, everyday errors can be detected at this time. For example, when ‘fclose’ writes the remaining buffered output, it might get an error because the disk is full. Even if you know the buffer is empty, errors can still occur when closing a file if you are using NFS. The function ‘fclose’ is declared in ‘stdio.h’. To close all streams currently available the GNU C Library provides another function. -- Function: int fcloseall (void) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:streams | AS-Unsafe | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function causes all open streams of the process to be closed and the connections to corresponding files to be broken. All buffered data is written and any buffered input is discarded. The ‘fcloseall’ function returns a value of ‘0’ if all the files were closed successfully, and ‘EOF’ if an error was detected. This function should be used only in special situations, e.g., when an error occurred and the program must be aborted. Normally each single stream should be closed separately so that problems with individual streams can be identified. It is also problematic since the standard streams (*note Standard Streams::) will also be closed. The function ‘fcloseall’ is declared in ‘stdio.h’. If the ‘main’ function to your program returns, or if you call the ‘exit’ function (*note Normal Termination::), all open streams are automatically closed properly. If your program terminates in any other manner, such as by calling the ‘abort’ function (*note Aborting a Program::) or from a fatal signal (*note Signal Handling::), open streams might not be closed properly. Buffered output might not be flushed and files may be incomplete. For more information on buffering of streams, see *note Stream Buffering::.  File: libc.info, Node: Streams and Threads, Next: Streams and I18N, Prev: Closing Streams, Up: I/O on Streams 12.5 Streams and Threads ======================== Streams can be used in multi-threaded applications in the same way they are used in single-threaded applications. But the programmer must be aware of the possible complications. It is important to know about these also if the program one writes never use threads since the design and implementation of many stream functions are heavily influenced by the requirements added by multi-threaded programming. The POSIX standard requires that by default the stream operations are atomic. I.e., issuing two stream operations for the same stream in two threads at the same time will cause the operations to be executed as if they were issued sequentially. The buffer operations performed while reading or writing are protected from other uses of the same stream. To do this each stream has an internal lock object which has to be (implicitly) acquired before any work can be done. But there are situations where this is not enough and there are also situations where this is not wanted. The implicit locking is not enough if the program requires more than one stream function call to happen atomically. One example would be if an output line a program wants to generate is created by several function calls. The functions by themselves would ensure only atomicity of their own operation, but not atomicity over all the function calls. For this it is necessary to perform the stream locking in the application code. -- Function: void flockfile (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Unsafe lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘flockfile’ function acquires the internal locking object associated with the stream STREAM. This ensures that no other thread can explicitly through ‘flockfile’/‘ftrylockfile’ or implicitly through the call of a stream function lock the stream. The thread will block until the lock is acquired. An explicit call to ‘funlockfile’ has to be used to release the lock. -- Function: int ftrylockfile (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Unsafe lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘ftrylockfile’ function tries to acquire the internal locking object associated with the stream STREAM just like ‘flockfile’. But unlike ‘flockfile’ this function does not block if the lock is not available. ‘ftrylockfile’ returns zero if the lock was successfully acquired. Otherwise the stream is locked by another thread. -- Function: void funlockfile (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Unsafe lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘funlockfile’ function releases the internal locking object of the stream STREAM. The stream must have been locked before by a call to ‘flockfile’ or a successful call of ‘ftrylockfile’. The implicit locking performed by the stream operations do not count. The ‘funlockfile’ function does not return an error status and the behavior of a call for a stream which is not locked by the current thread is undefined. The following example shows how the functions above can be used to generate an output line atomically even in multi-threaded applications (yes, the same job could be done with one ‘fprintf’ call but it is sometimes not possible): FILE *fp; { ... flockfile (fp); fputs ("This is test number ", fp); fprintf (fp, "%d\n", test); funlockfile (fp) } Without the explicit locking it would be possible for another thread to use the stream FP after the ‘fputs’ call returns and before ‘fprintf’ was called with the result that the number does not follow the word ‘number’. From this description it might already be clear that the locking objects in streams are no simple mutexes. Since locking the same stream twice in the same thread is allowed the locking objects must be equivalent to recursive mutexes. These mutexes keep track of the owner and the number of times the lock is acquired. The same number of ‘funlockfile’ calls by the same threads is necessary to unlock the stream completely. For instance: void foo (FILE *fp) { ftrylockfile (fp); fputs ("in foo\n", fp); /* This is very wrong!!! */ funlockfile (fp); } It is important here that the ‘funlockfile’ function is only called if the ‘ftrylockfile’ function succeeded in locking the stream. It is therefore always wrong to ignore the result of ‘ftrylockfile’. And it makes no sense since otherwise one would use ‘flockfile’. The result of code like that above is that either ‘funlockfile’ tries to free a stream that hasn’t been locked by the current thread or it frees the stream prematurely. The code should look like this: void foo (FILE *fp) { if (ftrylockfile (fp) == 0) { fputs ("in foo\n", fp); funlockfile (fp); } } Now that we covered why it is necessary to have locking it is necessary to talk about situations when locking is unwanted and what can be done. The locking operations (explicit or implicit) don’t come for free. Even if a lock is not taken the cost is not zero. The operations which have to be performed require memory operations that are safe in multi-processor environments. With the many local caches involved in such systems this is quite costly. So it is best to avoid the locking completely if it is not needed – because the code in question is never used in a context where two or more threads may use a stream at a time. This can be determined most of the time for application code; for library code which can be used in many contexts one should default to be conservative and use locking. There are two basic mechanisms to avoid locking. The first is to use the ‘_unlocked’ variants of the stream operations. The POSIX standard defines quite a few of those and the GNU C Library adds a few more. These variants of the functions behave just like the functions with the name without the suffix except that they do not lock the stream. Using these functions is very desirable since they are potentially much faster. This is not only because the locking operation itself is avoided. More importantly, functions like ‘putc’ and ‘getc’ are very simple and traditionally (before the introduction of threads) were implemented as macros which are very fast if the buffer is not empty. With the addition of locking requirements these functions are no longer implemented as macros since they would expand to too much code. But these macros are still available with the same functionality under the new names ‘putc_unlocked’ and ‘getc_unlocked’. This possibly huge difference of speed also suggests the use of the ‘_unlocked’ functions even if locking is required. The difference is that the locking then has to be performed in the program: void foo (FILE *fp, char *buf) { flockfile (fp); while (*buf != '/') putc_unlocked (*buf++, fp); funlockfile (fp); } If in this example the ‘putc’ function would be used and the explicit locking would be missing the ‘putc’ function would have to acquire the lock in every call, potentially many times depending on when the loop terminates. Writing it the way illustrated above allows the ‘putc_unlocked’ macro to be used which means no locking and direct manipulation of the buffer of the stream. A second way to avoid locking is by using a non-standard function which was introduced in Solaris and is available in the GNU C Library as well. -- Function: int __fsetlocking (FILE *STREAM, int TYPE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe lock | AC-Safe | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘__fsetlocking’ function can be used to select whether the stream operations will implicitly acquire the locking object of the stream STREAM. By default this is done but it can be disabled and reinstated using this function. There are three values defined for the TYPE parameter. ‘FSETLOCKING_INTERNAL’ The stream ‘stream’ will from now on use the default internal locking. Every stream operation with exception of the ‘_unlocked’ variants will implicitly lock the stream. ‘FSETLOCKING_BYCALLER’ After the ‘__fsetlocking’ function returns, the user is responsible for locking the stream. None of the stream operations will implicitly do this anymore until the state is set back to ‘FSETLOCKING_INTERNAL’. ‘FSETLOCKING_QUERY’ ‘__fsetlocking’ only queries the current locking state of the stream. The return value will be ‘FSETLOCKING_INTERNAL’ or ‘FSETLOCKING_BYCALLER’ depending on the state. The return value of ‘__fsetlocking’ is either ‘FSETLOCKING_INTERNAL’ or ‘FSETLOCKING_BYCALLER’ depending on the state of the stream before the call. This function and the values for the TYPE parameter are declared in ‘stdio_ext.h’. This function is especially useful when program code has to be used which is written without knowledge about the ‘_unlocked’ functions (or if the programmer was too lazy to use them).  File: libc.info, Node: Streams and I18N, Next: Simple Output, Prev: Streams and Threads, Up: I/O on Streams 12.6 Streams in Internationalized Applications ============================================== ISO C90 introduced the new type ‘wchar_t’ to allow handling larger character sets. What was missing was a possibility to output strings of ‘wchar_t’ directly. One had to convert them into multibyte strings using ‘mbstowcs’ (there was no ‘mbsrtowcs’ yet) and then use the normal stream functions. While this is doable it is very cumbersome since performing the conversions is not trivial and greatly increases program complexity and size. The Unix standard early on (I think in XPG4.2) introduced two additional format specifiers for the ‘printf’ and ‘scanf’ families of functions. Printing and reading of single wide characters was made possible using the ‘%C’ specifier and wide character strings can be handled with ‘%S’. These modifiers behave just like ‘%c’ and ‘%s’ only that they expect the corresponding argument to have the wide character type and that the wide character and string are transformed into/from multibyte strings before being used. This was a beginning but it is still not good enough. Not always is it desirable to use ‘printf’ and ‘scanf’. The other, smaller and faster functions cannot handle wide characters. Second, it is not possible to have a format string for ‘printf’ and ‘scanf’ consisting of wide characters. The result is that format strings would have to be generated if they have to contain non-basic characters. In the Amendment 1 to ISO C90 a whole new set of functions was added to solve the problem. Most of the stream functions got a counterpart which take a wide character or wide character string instead of a character or string respectively. The new functions operate on the same streams (like ‘stdout’). This is different from the model of the C++ runtime library where separate streams for wide and normal I/O are used. Being able to use the same stream for wide and normal operations comes with a restriction: a stream can be used either for wide operations or for normal operations. Once it is decided there is no way back. Only a call to ‘freopen’ or ‘freopen64’ can reset the “orientation”. The orientation can be decided in three ways: • If any of the normal character functions are used (this includes the ‘fread’ and ‘fwrite’ functions) the stream is marked as not wide oriented. • If any of the wide character functions are used the stream is marked as wide oriented. • The ‘fwide’ function can be used to set the orientation either way. It is important to never mix the use of wide and not wide operations on a stream. There are no diagnostics issued. The application behavior will simply be strange or the application will simply crash. The ‘fwide’ function can help avoid this. -- Function: int fwide (FILE *STREAM, int MODE) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fwide’ function can be used to set and query the state of the orientation of the stream STREAM. If the MODE parameter has a positive value the streams get wide oriented, for negative values narrow oriented. It is not possible to overwrite previous orientations with ‘fwide’. I.e., if the stream STREAM was already oriented before the call nothing is done. If MODE is zero the current orientation state is queried and nothing is changed. The ‘fwide’ function returns a negative value, zero, or a positive value if the stream is narrow, not at all, or wide oriented respectively. This function was introduced in Amendment 1 to ISO C90 and is declared in ‘wchar.h’. It is generally a good idea to orient a stream as early as possible. This can prevent surprise especially for the standard streams ‘stdin’, ‘stdout’, and ‘stderr’. If some library function in some situations uses one of these streams and this use orients the stream in a different way the rest of the application expects it one might end up with hard to reproduce errors. Remember that no errors are signal if the streams are used incorrectly. Leaving a stream unoriented after creation is normally only necessary for library functions which create streams which can be used in different contexts. When writing code which uses streams and which can be used in different contexts it is important to query the orientation of the stream before using it (unless the rules of the library interface demand a specific orientation). The following little, silly function illustrates this. void print_f (FILE *fp) { if (fwide (fp, 0) > 0) /* Positive return value means wide orientation. */ fputwc (L'f', fp); else fputc ('f', fp); } Note that in this case the function ‘print_f’ decides about the orientation of the stream if it was unoriented before (will not happen if the advice above is followed). The encoding used for the ‘wchar_t’ values is unspecified and the user must not make any assumptions about it. For I/O of ‘wchar_t’ values this means that it is impossible to write these values directly to the stream. This is not what follows from the ISO C locale model either. What happens instead is that the bytes read from or written to the underlying media are first converted into the internal encoding chosen by the implementation for ‘wchar_t’. The external encoding is determined by the ‘LC_CTYPE’ category of the current locale or by the ‘ccs’ part of the mode specification given to ‘fopen’, ‘fopen64’, ‘freopen’, or ‘freopen64’. How and when the conversion happens is unspecified and it happens invisibly to the user. Since a stream is created in the unoriented state it has at that point no conversion associated with it. The conversion which will be used is determined by the ‘LC_CTYPE’ category selected at the time the stream is oriented. If the locales are changed at the runtime this might produce surprising results unless one pays attention. This is just another good reason to orient the stream explicitly as soon as possible, perhaps with a call to ‘fwide’.  File: libc.info, Node: Simple Output, Next: Character Input, Prev: Streams and I18N, Up: I/O on Streams 12.7 Simple Output by Characters or Lines ========================================= This section describes functions for performing character- and line-oriented output. These narrow stream functions are declared in the header file ‘stdio.h’ and the wide stream functions in ‘wchar.h’. -- Function: int fputc (int C, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputc’ function converts the character C to type ‘unsigned char’, and writes it to the stream STREAM. ‘EOF’ is returned if a write error occurs; otherwise the character C is returned. -- Function: wint_t fputwc (wchar_t WC, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputwc’ function writes the wide character WC to the stream STREAM. ‘WEOF’ is returned if a write error occurs; otherwise the character WC is returned. -- Function: int fputc_unlocked (int C, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fputc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t fputwc_unlocked (wchar_t WC, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputwc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fputwc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int putc (int C, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This is just like ‘fputc’, except that most systems implement it as a macro, making it faster. One consequence is that it may evaluate the STREAM argument more than once, which is an exception to the general rule for macros. ‘putc’ is usually the best function to use for writing a single character. -- Function: wint_t putwc (wchar_t WC, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This is just like ‘fputwc’, except that it can be implement as a macro, making it faster. One consequence is that it may evaluate the STREAM argument more than once, which is an exception to the general rule for macros. ‘putwc’ is usually the best function to use for writing a single wide character. -- Function: int putc_unlocked (int C, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘putc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t putwc_unlocked (wchar_t WC, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putwc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘putwc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int putchar (int C) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putchar’ function is equivalent to ‘putc’ with ‘stdout’ as the value of the STREAM argument. -- Function: wint_t putwchar (wchar_t WC) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putwchar’ function is equivalent to ‘putwc’ with ‘stdout’ as the value of the STREAM argument. -- Function: int putchar_unlocked (int C) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:stdout | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putchar_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘putchar’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t putwchar_unlocked (wchar_t WC) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:stdout | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘putwchar_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘putwchar’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int fputs (const char *S, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The function ‘fputs’ writes the string S to the stream STREAM. The terminating null character is not written. This function does _not_ add a newline character, either. It outputs only the characters in the string. This function returns ‘EOF’ if a write error occurs, and otherwise a non-negative value. For example: fputs ("Are ", stdout); fputs ("you ", stdout); fputs ("hungry?\n", stdout); outputs the text ‘Are you hungry?’ followed by a newline. -- Function: int fputws (const wchar_t *WS, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt lock | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The function ‘fputws’ writes the wide character string WS to the stream STREAM. The terminating null character is not written. This function does _not_ add a newline character, either. It outputs only the characters in the string. This function returns ‘WEOF’ if a write error occurs, and otherwise a non-negative value. -- Function: int fputs_unlocked (const char *S, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputs_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fputs’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int fputws_unlocked (const wchar_t *WS, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fputws_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fputws’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int puts (const char *S) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘puts’ function writes the string S to the stream ‘stdout’ followed by a newline. The terminating null character of the string is not written. (Note that ‘fputs’ does _not_ write a newline as this function does.) ‘puts’ is the most convenient function for printing simple messages. For example: puts ("This is a message."); outputs the text ‘This is a message.’ followed by a newline. -- Function: int putw (int W, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function writes the word W (that is, an ‘int’) to STREAM. It is provided for compatibility with SVID, but we recommend you use ‘fwrite’ instead (*note Block Input/Output::).  File: libc.info, Node: Character Input, Next: Line Input, Prev: Simple Output, Up: I/O on Streams 12.8 Character Input ==================== This section describes functions for performing character-oriented input. These narrow stream functions are declared in the header file ‘stdio.h’ and the wide character functions are declared in ‘wchar.h’. These functions return an ‘int’ or ‘wint_t’ value (for narrow and wide stream functions respectively) that is either a character of input, or the special value ‘EOF’/‘WEOF’ (usually -1). For the narrow stream functions it is important to store the result of these functions in a variable of type ‘int’ instead of ‘char’, even when you plan to use it only as a character. Storing ‘EOF’ in a ‘char’ variable truncates its value to the size of a character, so that it is no longer distinguishable from the valid character ‘(char) -1’. So always use an ‘int’ for the result of ‘getc’ and friends, and check for ‘EOF’ after the call; once you’ve verified that the result is not ‘EOF’, you can be sure that it will fit in a ‘char’ variable without loss of information. -- Function: int fgetc (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function reads the next character as an ‘unsigned char’ from the stream STREAM and returns its value, converted to an ‘int’. If an end-of-file condition or read error occurs, ‘EOF’ is returned instead. -- Function: wint_t fgetwc (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function reads the next wide character from the stream STREAM and returns its value. If an end-of-file condition or read error occurs, ‘WEOF’ is returned instead. -- Function: int fgetc_unlocked (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgetc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fgetc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t fgetwc_unlocked (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgetwc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fgetwc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int getc (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This is just like ‘fgetc’, except that it is permissible (and typical) for it to be implemented as a macro that evaluates the STREAM argument more than once. ‘getc’ is often highly optimized, so it is usually the best function to use to read a single character. -- Function: wint_t getwc (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This is just like ‘fgetwc’, except that it is permissible for it to be implemented as a macro that evaluates the STREAM argument more than once. ‘getwc’ can be highly optimized, so it is usually the best function to use to read a single wide character. -- Function: int getc_unlocked (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘getc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t getwc_unlocked (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getwc_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘getwc’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: int getchar (void) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getchar’ function is equivalent to ‘getc’ with ‘stdin’ as the value of the STREAM argument. -- Function: wint_t getwchar (void) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getwchar’ function is equivalent to ‘getwc’ with ‘stdin’ as the value of the STREAM argument. -- Function: int getchar_unlocked (void) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:stdin | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getchar_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘getchar’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. -- Function: wint_t getwchar_unlocked (void) Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:stdin | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘getwchar_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘getwchar’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. Here is an example of a function that does input using ‘fgetc’. It would work just as well using ‘getc’ instead, or using ‘getchar ()’ instead of ‘fgetc (stdin)’. The code would also work the same for the wide character stream functions. int y_or_n_p (const char *question) { fputs (question, stdout); while (1) { int c, answer; /* Write a space to separate answer from question. */ fputc (' ', stdout); /* Read the first character of the line. This should be the answer character, but might not be. */ c = tolower (fgetc (stdin)); answer = c; /* Discard rest of input line. */ while (c != '\n' && c != EOF) c = fgetc (stdin); /* Obey the answer if it was valid. */ if (answer == 'y') return 1; if (answer == 'n') return 0; /* Answer was invalid: ask for valid answer. */ fputs ("Please answer y or n:", stdout); } } -- Function: int getw (FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function reads a word (that is, an ‘int’) from STREAM. It’s provided for compatibility with SVID. We recommend you use ‘fread’ instead (*note Block Input/Output::). Unlike ‘getc’, any ‘int’ value could be a valid result. ‘getw’ returns ‘EOF’ when it encounters end-of-file or an error, but there is no way to distinguish this from an input word with value -1.  File: libc.info, Node: Line Input, Next: Unreading, Prev: Character Input, Up: I/O on Streams 12.9 Line-Oriented Input ======================== Since many programs interpret input on the basis of lines, it is convenient to have functions to read a line of text from a stream. Standard C has functions to do this, but they aren’t very safe: null characters and even (for ‘gets’) long lines can confuse them. So the GNU C Library provides the nonstandard ‘getline’ function that makes it easy to read lines reliably. Another GNU extension, ‘getdelim’, generalizes ‘getline’. It reads a delimited record, defined as everything through the next occurrence of a specified delimiter character. All these functions are declared in ‘stdio.h’. -- Function: ssize_t getline (char **LINEPTR, size_t *N, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function reads an entire line from STREAM, storing the text (including the newline and a terminating null character) in a buffer and storing the buffer address in ‘*LINEPTR’. Before calling ‘getline’, you should place in ‘*LINEPTR’ the address of a buffer ‘*N’ bytes long, allocated with ‘malloc’. If this buffer is long enough to hold the line, ‘getline’ stores the line in this buffer. Otherwise, ‘getline’ makes the buffer bigger using ‘realloc’, storing the new buffer address back in ‘*LINEPTR’ and the increased size back in ‘*N’. *Note Unconstrained Allocation::. If you set ‘*LINEPTR’ to a null pointer, and ‘*N’ to zero, before the call, then ‘getline’ allocates the initial buffer for you by calling ‘malloc’. This buffer remains allocated even if ‘getline’ encounters errors and is unable to read any bytes. In either case, when ‘getline’ returns, ‘*LINEPTR’ is a ‘char *’ which points to the text of the line. When ‘getline’ is successful, it returns the number of characters read (including the newline, but not including the terminating null). This value enables you to distinguish null characters that are part of the line from the null character inserted as a terminator. This function is a GNU extension, but it is the recommended way to read lines from a stream. The alternative standard functions are unreliable. If an error occurs or end of file is reached without any bytes read, ‘getline’ returns ‘-1’. -- Function: ssize_t getdelim (char **LINEPTR, size_t *N, int DELIMITER, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt heap | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt mem | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. This function is like ‘getline’ except that the character which tells it to stop reading is not necessarily newline. The argument DELIMITER specifies the delimiter character; ‘getdelim’ keeps reading until it sees that character (or end of file). The text is stored in LINEPTR, including the delimiter character and a terminating null. Like ‘getline’, ‘getdelim’ makes LINEPTR bigger if it isn’t big enough. ‘getline’ is in fact implemented in terms of ‘getdelim’, just like this: ssize_t getline (char **lineptr, size_t *n, FILE *stream) { return getdelim (lineptr, n, '\n', stream); } -- Function: char * fgets (char *S, int COUNT, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgets’ function reads characters from the stream STREAM up to and including a newline character and stores them in the string S, adding a null character to mark the end of the string. You must supply COUNT characters worth of space in S, but the number of characters read is at most COUNT − 1. The extra character space is used to hold the null character at the end of the string. If the system is already at end of file when you call ‘fgets’, then the contents of the array S are unchanged and a null pointer is returned. A null pointer is also returned if a read error occurs. Otherwise, the return value is the pointer S. *Warning:* If the input data has a null character, you can’t tell. So don’t use ‘fgets’ unless you know the data cannot contain a null. Don’t use it to read files edited by the user because, if the user inserts a null character, you should either handle it properly or print a clear error message. We recommend using ‘getline’ instead of ‘fgets’. -- Function: wchar_t * fgetws (wchar_t *WS, int COUNT, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgetws’ function reads wide characters from the stream STREAM up to and including a newline character and stores them in the string WS, adding a null wide character to mark the end of the string. You must supply COUNT wide characters worth of space in WS, but the number of characters read is at most COUNT − 1. The extra character space is used to hold the null wide character at the end of the string. If the system is already at end of file when you call ‘fgetws’, then the contents of the array WS are unchanged and a null pointer is returned. A null pointer is also returned if a read error occurs. Otherwise, the return value is the pointer WS. *Warning:* If the input data has a null wide character (which are null bytes in the input stream), you can’t tell. So don’t use ‘fgetws’ unless you know the data cannot contain a null. Don’t use it to read files edited by the user because, if the user inserts a null character, you should either handle it properly or print a clear error message. -- Function: char * fgets_unlocked (char *S, int COUNT, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgets_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fgets’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Function: wchar_t * fgetws_unlocked (wchar_t *WS, int COUNT, FILE *STREAM) Preliminary: | MT-Safe race:stream | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The ‘fgetws_unlocked’ function is equivalent to the ‘fgetws’ function except that it does not implicitly lock the stream. This function is a GNU extension. -- Deprecated function: char * gets (char *S) Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt | *Note POSIX Safety Concepts::. The function ‘gets’ reads characters from the stream ‘stdin’ up to the next newline character, and stores them in the string S. The newline character is discarded (note that this differs from the behavior of ‘fgets’, which copies the newline character into the string). If ‘gets’ encounters a read error or end-of-file, it returns a null pointer; otherwise it returns S. *Warning:* The ‘gets’ function is *very dangerous* because it provides no protection against overflowing the string S. The GNU C Library includes it for compatibility only. You should *always* use ‘fgets’ or ‘getline’ instead. To remind you of this, the linker (if using GNU ‘ld’) will issue a warning whenever you use ‘gets’.