Linux® Programming by Example

Chapter 6. General Library Interfaces — Part 1

In this chapter

• 6.1 Times and Dates page 166

• 6.2 Sorting and Searching Functions page 181

• 6.3 User and Group Names page 195

• 6.4 Terminals: isatty() page 202

• 6.5 Suggested Reading page 203

• 6.6 Summary page 203

• Exercises page 205

We saw in Chapter 5, “Directories and File Metadata,” page 117, that directly reading a directory returns filenames in the order in which they’re kept in the directory. We also saw that the struct stat contains all the information about a file, except its name. However, some components of that structure are not directly usable; they’re just numeric values.

This chapter presents the rest of the APIs needed to make full use of the struct stat component values. In order, we cover the following ...