Section 3 of the manual describes all library functions excluding the library functions (system call wrappers) described in section 2, which implement system calls.
Many of the functions described in the section are part
of the Standard C Library (libc
Some functions are part of other
libraries (e.g., the math library, libm
or the real-time library,
librt
in which case the
manual page will indicate the linker option needed to link
against the required library (e.g., −lm
and −lrt
, respectively, for the
aforementioned libraries).
In some cases, the programmer must define a feature test macro in order to obtain the declaration of a function from the header file specified in the man page SYNOPSIS section. In such cases, the required macro is described in the man page. For further information on feature test macros, see feature_test_macros(7).
Certain terms and abbreviations are used to indicate Unix variants and standards to which calls in this section conform. See standards(7).
Copyright (C) 2007 Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpagesgmail.com> Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working professionally. Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. 2007-10-23 mtk, Nearly a complete rewrite of the earlier page. |