The unix library: Unix system calls

# Chapter 24 The unix library: Unix system calls

The unix library makes many Unix system calls and system-related library functions available to OCaml programs. This chapter describes briefly the functions provided. Refer to sections 2 and 3 of the Unix manual for more details on the behavior of these functions.

Not all functions are provided by all Unix variants. If some functions are not available, they will raise Invalid_arg when called.

Programs that use the unix library must be linked as follows:

            ocamlc other options unix.cma other files
            ocamlopt other options unix.cmxa other files

For interactive use of the unix library, do:

            ocamlmktop -o mytop unix.cma
            ./mytop

or (if dynamic linking of C libraries is supported on your platform), start ocaml and type #load "unix.cma";;.

> Windows: A fairly complete emulation of the Unix system calls is provided in the Windows version of OCaml. The end of this chapter gives more information on the functions that are not supported under Windows.

- Module Unix: Unix system calls
- Module UnixLabels: Labeled Unix system calls

> Windows: The Cygwin port of OCaml fully implements all functions from the Unix module. The native Win32 ports implement a subset of them. Below is a list of the functions that are not implemented, or only partially implemented, by the Win32 ports. Functions not mentioned are fully implemented and behave as described previously in this chapter.

> Functions | Comment
> fork | not implemented, use create_process or threads
> wait | not implemented, use waitpid
> waitpid | can only wait for a given PID, not any child process
> getppid | not implemented (meaningless under Windows)
> nice | not implemented
> truncate, ftruncate | not implemented
> link | implemented (since 3.02)
> symlink, readlink | implemented (since 4.03.0)
> access | execute permission X_OK cannot be tested, it just tests for read permission instead
> fchmod | not implemented
> chown, fchown | not implemented (make no sense on a DOS file system)
> umask | not implemented
> mkfifo | not implemented
> kill | partially implemented (since 4.00.0): only the sigkill signal is implemented
> pause | not implemented (no inter-process signals in Windows)
> alarm | not implemented
> times | partially implemented, will not report timings for child processes
> getitimer, setitimer | not implemented
> getuid, geteuid, getgid, getegid | always return 1
> getgroups | always returns [|1|] (since 2.00)
> setuid, setgid, setgroups | not implemented
> getpwnam, getpwuid | always raise Not_found
> getgrnam, getgrgid | always raise Not_found
> type socket_domain | PF_INET is fully supported; PF_INET6 is fully supported (since 4.01.0); PF_UNIX is not supported
> establish_server | not implemented; use threads
> terminal functions (tc*) | not implemented