Saturday, October 3, 2009

man-pages-3.23 release; my book progresses

I've uploaded man-pages-3.23 into the release directory (or view the online pages). This release consists entirely of fixes to existing pages.

Meanwhile, progress continues on my book providing a detailed description of Linux and Unix system programming. We now have a title: The Linux Programming Interface. I've also posted the detailed table of contents of chapters 1 to 42. (Full list of chapters here; draft preface here.)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I've been long waiting for a book like this and I'm thrilled to see it becoming ready soon.

I didn't see it in the list but do you also cover "modern" interfaces like openat() & co which are now preferred by many?

Also just a hint wrt capabilities, are you aware of libcap-ng and how it makes life easier for many? See:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/LowerProcessCapabilities

The last thing which I'm puzzled in general is file monitoring.. To me it seems that there's work going on at lkml to provide one more (final?) file monitoring interface, fsnotify, which would make inotify and dnotify deprecated/obsolete. Although it is not yet in, it might be worth mentioning for those who read the book few years after its release ;)

Thanks for your efforts, keep up the good work!

Anonymous said...

Hola, I think few words about i18n/l10n would be nice, wouldn't it? Otherwise looks perfect :-)

Anonymous said...

Hi, it's me, the first anonymous again! I started to think about this more now when I saw what this is concretely about. In addition to the content listing you've posted and the things I mentioned in my first comment I can't think anything additional, this simply sounds perfect. I was thinking about security and performance sections but then again I'm pretty sure they're best covered among the same place as the particular interfaces being introduced.

Anyway, one more certain buyer here getting excited already :-)

Michael Kerrisk said...

@anonymous post 1: yes, I cover openat() & co. I wasn't aware of libcap-ng. Hard to know now whether to mention it, since it may, or may not, become the standard. The future status offanotify is not clear; probably better to blog about it if/when it arrives.

@anonymous post 2: there is a *little* bit about i18n in my book, but probably not as much as I expect you would like to see.

j.eng said...

Personally I would prefer if you could arrange with the printing company to perhaps split your book into multiples - for the simple reason that carrying and wielding a heavy 1000+ page book is certainly no fun. (I usually read during commutes.) Linux Networking Internals from O'Reilly for example is 4.3 cm thick and weighs 1.4 kg for 1050 pages, something that would have been easier to churn if it were half the size.

Anonymous said...

It seems that the inotify API is going away soon:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=cdc321ff0af78e818c97d4787f62bf52bdf9db2a

Anonymous said...

Ok its great to see its almost published.
Do you have an idea of when itmight be either this year or next

debs

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Most Linux man pages for commands do not include examples. I've always wondered why this is. Do you know if there is some history behind this?

The web is able to provide plenty of examples today but that wasn't always the case.

Thanks,

Bruce

Anonymous said...

Dear Anonymous,

The inotify system calls aren't going away.

CONFIG_INOTIFY is for an internal kernel interface, which is already no longer used.