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Hands-On System Programming with Go

You're reading from   Hands-On System Programming with Go Build modern and concurrent applications for Unix and Linux systems using Golang

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789804072
Length 458 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Alex Guerrieri Alex Guerrieri
Author Profile Icon Alex Guerrieri
Alex Guerrieri
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Table of Contents (24) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: An Introduction to System Programming and Go FREE CHAPTER
2. An Introduction to System Programming 3. Unix OS Components 4. An Overview of Go 5. Section 2: Advanced File I/O Operations
6. Working with the Filesystem 7. Handling Streams 8. Building Pseudo-Terminals 9. Section 3: Understanding Process Communication
10. Handling Processes and Daemons 11. Exit Codes, Signals, and Pipes 12. Network Programming 13. Data Encoding Using Go 14. Section 4: Deep Dive into Concurrency
15. Dealing with Channels and Goroutines 16. Synchronization with sync and atomic 17. Coordination Using Context 18. Implementing Concurrency Patterns 19. Section 5: A Guide to Using Reflection and CGO
20. Using Reflection 21. Using CGO 22. Assessments 23. Other Books You May Enjoy

Reading from files

Getting the contents of a file can be done with an auxiliary function in the io/ioutil package, as well as with the  ReadFile function, which opens, reads, and closes the file at once. This uses a small buffer (512 bytes) and loads the whole content in memory. This is not a good idea if the file size is very large, unknown, or if the content of the file can be processed one part at a time. 

Reading a huge file from disk at once means copying all the file's content into the primary memory, which is a limited resource. This can cause memory shortages, as well as runtime errors. Reading chunks of a file at a time can help read the content of big files without causing huge memory usage. This is because the same part of the memory will be reused when reading the next chunk.

An example of reading all the content at once is shown...

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