Have you ever wanted to read a file one line at a time in a shell script and found the task to be a lot more trouble than you ever imagined? If you use a “for line ...

The actual permissions that result are complicated by the fact that the process has a default permissions mask - umask. The effective permissions are given by mode & ~umask which means that the bits ...

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

Last week’s column looked at how we can read from and write to files by associated the files with user-defined file descriptors. This week, we take this idea a bit further. Closing File Descriptors In ...