Anatomy of a simple Linux utility

Summary

In this article, I first looked at how Bash finds the location of the binary corresponding to the ls command; then, I showed how the kernel knows how to execute the binary using the appropriate binary handler. Finally, I dived deeper to see how the directory listing is retrieved from the underlying filesystem.

Infos

  1. Bash source: http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=bash
  2. Coreutils: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/
  3. SystemTap Beginners Guide: https://sourceware.org/systemtap/SystemTap_Beginners_Guide/
  4. SystemTap tutorial: https://sourceware.org/systemtap/tutorial/
  5. Linux kernel source: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
  6. The Linux Kernel Archives: http://kernel.org

The Author

Amit Saha is a Software Engineer at Red Hat in Brisbane, Australia. He is working on his second book, Doing Math with Python and writes on various Linux and programming topics. He blogs at http://echorand.me.

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