intro - introduction to library functions
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. (Where required, these
feature test macros must be defined before including any
header
files.) 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).
Look at the header of the manual page source for the author(s) and copyright conditions. Note that these can be different from page to page!
intro(2), errno(3), capabilities(7), credentials(7), environ(7), feature_test_macros(7), libc(7), math_error(7), path_resolution(7), pthreads(7), signal(7), standards(7), system_data_types(7)
This page is part of release 5.10 of the Linux man-pages
project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs,
and the latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.