System calls and library calls


I have wondered for sometime what the difference is between system calls (found in section 2 of the man pages) and library calls (in section 3). Its simple...

It is worth noting that, because system calls are part of the O/S. The program has to make a context switch to the kernel when they are called and because of this, they have a high startup overhead. The upside is that the time executing these routines is assigned to the OS and not the user program.


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Martin Leslie