Practical Unix Programming:
A Guide to Concurrency, Communication, and Multithreading
by Kay. A. Robbins and Steven Robbins
Chapter 3:
Files
One of the most desirable features of Unix is device independence.
The uniform device interface through file descriptors
allows the same I/O calls to be used for terminals, disks, tapes,
audio, and even network communication.
This chapter explores Unix device-independent I/O, blocking and
nonblocking I/O, and special files such as pipes.
The chapter also covers filters, pipelines, redirection,
directory traversal, and descriptor inheritance.
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