libskarnet
skalibs
Software
www.skarnet.org

The stddjb library interface

libstddjb is the base, and the most important part, of skalibs. It is a set of general-purpose C functions wrapping some system calls, hiding some Unix portability problems, providing some basic low-level buffering functions and string handling, and generally offering a nice API to Unix programming - in many ways nicer and safer than the "standard" Unix APIs like stdio.h.

It is mostly based on some excellent code written and placed into the public domain by D. J. Bernstein.

Compiling

• The libstddjb functions are available under the skalibs/stddjb.h header, which includes a lot of lower-level headers. If you know what lower-level headers to use, you might speed up your compilation process by including them directly.

Programming

• skalibs/alarm.h: sub-second precision alarm()
• skalibs/alloc.h: basic heap memory allocation primitives
• skalibs/allreadwrite.h: safe wrappers around I/O functions, extra I/O functions
• skalibs/bitarray.h: how to handle large arrays of bits
• skalibs/bufalloc.h: bufferized output (with dynamically allocated buffers)
• skalibs/buffer.h: bufferized I/O (with statically allocated buffers)
• skalibs/bytestr.h: basic operations on strings and byte arrays
• skalibs/cdb.h: how to read cdb files
• skalibs/cdbmake.h: how to write cdb files
• skalibs/cspawn.h: child spawning primitives that use posix_spawn instead of fork when supported
• skalibs/direntry.h: portable directory operations
• skalibs/djbtime.h: conversions between date and time formats
• skalibs/djbunix.h: management of basic Unix concepts
• skalibs/envalloc.h: management of dynamically allocated argv and envp
• skalibs/env.h: management of argv and envp
• skalibs/exec.h: execution functions, with or without a newly built environment
• skalibs/fmtscan.h: formatters (printers) and scanners (parsers) for basic C types
• skalibs/genalloc.h: generic advanced management of dynamically allocated structures
• skalibs/genwrite.h: interface to generic writes either to strallocs or to buffers
• skalibs/getpeereid.h: the getpeereid() system call
• skalibs/iopause.h: the skalibs event loop selection function
• skalibs/lolstdio.h: printf-like functions writing into buffers or bufallocs
• skalibs/mininetstring.h: a protocol to transmit variable-length messages (limited to 64kB)
• skalibs/netstring.h: a protocol to transmit variable-length messages (limited to 2^32 bytes)
• skalibs/segfault.h: voluntary error generation
• skalibs/selfpipe.h: automated selfpipe trick (i.e. how to safely handle signals in event loops)
• skalibs/sgetopt.h: getopt()-style command-line options management
• skalibs/sig.h: safe signal management
• skalibs/siovec.h: scatter/gather IO primitives working with an iovec structure
• skalibs/skamisc.h: general string quoting and parsing; miscellaneous, unclassifiable functions
• skalibs/socket.h: UNIX, INET and INET6 domain sockets
• skalibs/stralloc.h: advanced management of dynamically allocated strings
• skalibs/strerr.h: print error messages
• skalibs/tai.h: time, timers and system clock

The following headers are automatically generated at compile-time, when the headers subsystem is made. The skalibs/stddjb.h file also includes them.

• skalibs/uint16.h: operations with 16-bit unsigned integers
• skalibs/uint32.h: operations with 32-bit unsigned integers
• skalibs/uint64.h: operations with 64-bit unsigned integers
• skalibs/types.h: portable helpers for common Unix types: size_t, uid_t, gid_t, pid_t, time_t, dev_t and ino_t.
• skalibs/error.h: portable macros for errno management
• skalibs/setgroups.h: stub for the setgroups() function, for systems that do not define it
• skalibs/ip46.h: IPv4/IPv6 abstraction layer

Additionally, stddjb.h also includes the following headers, which are not associated with any code and are mostly self-explanatory:

• skalibs/gccattributes.h: wrappers around a few GCC-specific optimizations
• skalibs/diuint.h: for associative arrays of unsigned integers
• skalibs/diuint32.h: for associative arrays of 32-bit unsigned integers
• skalibs/disize.h: for associative arrays of size_t
• skalibs/nsig.h: the number of system signals, for systems that do not define it
• skalibs/nonposix.h: feature test macros for non-POSIX-compliant systems