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8 POSIX interface

(This chapter was derived from work copyrighted (C) 1993-2005 by Richard Kelsey, Jonathan Rees, and Mike Sperber.)

This chapter describes Scheme48's interface to POSIX C calls. Scheme versions of most of the C functions in POSIX are provided. Both the interface and implementation are new and likely to change significantly in future releases. The implementation may also contain many bugs.

The POSIX bindings are available in several structures:

posix-processes
fork, exec, and other process manipulation procedures


posix-process-data
procedures for accessing information about processes


posix-files
POSIX file system access procedures


posix-i/o
pipes and various POSIX I/O controls


posix-time
POSIX time operations


posix-users
user and group manipulation procedures


posix-regexps
POSIX regular expression construction and matching


posix
all of the above

Scheme48's POSIX interface differs from scsh [Shivers 94; Shivers 96; Shivers et al. 04] in several ways. The interface here lacks scsh's high-level constructs and utilities such as the process notation, awk facility, and parsing utilities. Scheme48 uses disjoint types for some values that scsh leaves as symbols or simple integers; these include file types, file modes, and user & group ids. Many of the names and other interface details are different as well.