Using POSIX Threads

Chapter 5

Using POSIX Threads

The POSIX¹ standards specify the coding standards for portable UNIX applications. Most UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems adhere to the key features of these; hence, an application coded to the standards will be portable between UNIX implemen-tations and UNIX-like operating systems, such as Linux and FreeBSD, and Mac OS X, which is also based on a UNIX-like kernel. Microsoft Windows does not implement the POSIX standards directly, although there are some solutions that enable programs writ-ten using POSIX interfaces to run on Windows platforms.

This chapter will discuss how to write multithreaded programs using the POSIX standard interfaces. These enable an application to create new threads and synchronize and share data between threads and processes.