beejjorgensen / bgipc

Beej's Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication source

Beej's Guide to Interprocess Communication

This is the source for Beej's Guide to Interprocess Communication

If you merely wish to read the guide, please visit the Beej's Guide to Interprocess Communication website.

This is here so that Beej has everything in a repo and so translators can easily clone it.

Build Instructions

Dependencies

• Gnu make (XCode make works, too)
• Python 3+
• Pandoc 2.7.3+
• XeLaTeX (can be found in TeX Live)
• Liberation fonts (sans, serif, mono)

Mac dependencies install (reopen terminal after doing this):

xcode-select --install                  # installs make
brew install python                     # installs Python3
brew install pandoc
brew install mactex                     # installs XeLaTeX
brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install font-liberation            # installs Liberation fonts

You might have to add something like this to your path to find xelatex:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/universal-darwin

Dependency: Build System

This depends on an external repo to build: Beej's Guide Build System for Pandoc.

You'll want to clone that repo as a sibling to this one:

mystuff-->bggit
      \-->bgbspd

The Makefiles here will look for the build system there.

You can override the bgbspd directory before running make like this:

export BGBSPD_BUILD_DIR=/some/path/to/bgbspd

Build

1. Type make all from the top-level directory.

   If you have Gnu Make, it should work fine. Other makes might work as well. Windows users might want to check out Cygwin.

2. Type make stage to copy all the build products and website to the stage directory.

3. There is no step three.

You can also cd to the src directory and make.

make clean cleans, and make pristine cleans to "original" state.

To embed your own fonts in the PDFs, see the src/Makefile for examples.

The upload target in the root Makefile demonstrates the build steps for a complete release. You'll need to change the UPLOADDIR macro in the top-level Makefile to point to your host if you want to use that. You're free to upload whatever versions you desire individually, as well.

Pull Requests

Please keep these on the scale of typo and bug fixes. That way I don't have to consider any copyright issues when merging changes.

bgipc's Issues

Bold formatting doesn't get rendered in code blocks

For example, on this line in chapter 6.2, this text in Markdown:

fl.l_type   = <b>F_UNLCK</b>;  /* tell it to unlock the region */

gets rendered as raw code, therefore including the <b> and </b> tags in both HTML and PDF output.

Section 4 duplicated section

On the beej.us site, there is a rendering bug around section 4.2 (it duplicates the entire section except the code snippet, see screen shot below).
https://beej.us/guide/bgipc/html/split/pipes.html#the-search-for-pipe-as-we-know-it

Looks like line 46 of bgipc_part_0400_pipes.md has a missing closing square bracket. I balanced the brackets on this line and things looked as expected.

bgipc/src/bgipc_part_0400_pipes.md

Line 46 in 53dac10

As a [flx[useless example|pipe1.c], the following program creates,

issue:
As a [flx[useless example|pipe1.c], the following program creates,
fix:
As a [flx[useless example|pipe1.c]], the following program creates,

bgipc_part_0500_fifos.md: `mknod` is used instead of `mkfifo`

I noticed that the guide promotes the use of mknod instead of mkfifo for creating the FIFOs, which contradicts the POSIX and the common advice I've seen. mkfifo isn't even mentioned as an alternative call.

Is there a specific reason, like difference in portability?

The POSIX standard states:

The mkfifo() function is preferred over this function for making FIFO special files.

The Linux manual for mknod also quotes POSIX.1-2001:

"The only portable use of mknod() is to create a FIFO-special file. If mode is not S_IFIFO or dev is not 0, the behavior of mknod() is unspecified." However, nowadays one should never use mknod() for this purpose; one should use mkfifo(3), a function especially defined for this purpose.