The life of a traditional Unix process is fairly straightforward. An existing process creates a copy of itself via the … See more

As previously mentioned, and contrary to naïve ex-pectations, statically linked programs begin in the __start() function, not in main(). This function handles initialization of process state that is not eas-ily compiled into the stat… See more

The main() function seen in Figure 5 on the following page simply calls printf() before re-turning to __start() in order to exit. printf () is implemented as a call to vfprintf(), which in turn retrieves the current thread’s locale via _… See more

Processes ultimately exit by being killed due to a signal or by calling the _exit() system call. Pro-grams, including those that return to the standard __start() function, call the exit() library func-tion to do this. The exit() functi… See more

Dynamically linked programs are similar to stati-cally linked programs with a few key differences. First, statically linked programs directly include all code they may call. Second, statically linked pro-grams are generally c… See more