Manual Pages  — INTRO

intro – introduction to the C libraries

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION FILES SEE ALSO HISTORY

cc [flags] file ... [-llibrary]

This section provides an overview of the C library functions, their error returns and other common definitions and concepts. Most of these functions are available from the C library, libc. Other libraries, such as the math library, libm, must be indicated at compile time with the -l option of the compiler.

The various libraries (followed by the loader flag):

libbluetooth (-l bluetooth)
	The bluetooth library. See bluetooth(3).
libc (-l c)	Standard C library functions. When using the C compiler cc(1), it is not necessary to supply the loader flag -l c for these functions. There are several `libraries' or groups of functions included inside of libc:

standard I/O routines
	see stdio(3)
database routines
	see db(3)
bit operators
	see bitstring(3)
string operators
	see string(3)
character tests and character operators storage allocation
	see mpool(3)
regular-expressions
	see regex(3)
remote procedure calls (RPC)
	see rpc(3)
time functions
	see time(3)
signal handling
	see signal(3)

libcalendar (-l calendar)
	The calendar arithmetic library. See calendar(3).
libcam (-l cam)
	The common access method user library. See cam(3).
libcrypt (-l crypt)
	The crypt library. See crypt(3).
libcurses (-l curses -l termcap)
	Terminal independent screen management routines for two dimensional non-bitmap display terminals. See ncurses(3).
libcuse (-l cuse)
	The userland character device library. See cuse(3).
libcompat (-l compat)
	Functions which are obsolete but are available for compatibility with BSD 4.3 . In particular, a number of system call interfaces provided in previous releases of BSD have been included for source code compatibility. Use of these routines should, for the most part, be avoided. The manual page entry for each compatibility routine indicates the proper interface to use.
libdevinfo (-l devinfo)
	The Device and Resource Information Utility library. See devinfo(3).
libdevstat (-l devstat)
	The Device Statistics library. See devstat(3).
libdwarf (-l dwarf)
	The DWARF access library. See dwarf(3).
libelf (-l elf)
	The ELF access library. See elf(3).
libfetch (-l fetch)
	The file transfer library. See fetch(3).
libfigpar (-l figpar)
	The configuration file parsing library. See figpar(3).
libgpio (-l gpio)
	The general-purpose input output library (GPIO). See gpio(3).
libgssapi (-l gssapi)
	The generic security service application programming interface. See gssapi(3).
libjail (-l jail)
	The jail library. See jail(3).
libkvm (-l kvm)
	Functions used to access kernel memory are in this library. They can be used against both a running system and a crash dump. See kvm(3).
libl (-l l)
	The library for lex(1).
libm (-l m)
	The math library. See math(3).
libmd (-l md)
	The message digest library. See md4(3), md5(3), sha(3), sha256(3), sha512(3), ripemd(3), skein(3).
libmp (-l mp) libpam (-l pam)
	The pluggable authentication module library. See pam(3).
libpcap (-l pcap)
	The packet capture library. See pcap(3).
libpmc (-l pmc)
	The performance counters library. See pmc(3).
libpthread (-l pthread)
	The POSIX threads library. See pthread(3).
libsysdecode (-l sysdecode)
	The system argument decoding library. See sysdecode(3).
libtermcap (-l termcap)
	The terminal independent operation library package. See termcap(3).
libusb (-l usb)
	The USB access library. See usb(3).
libvgl (-l vgl)
	The video graphics library. See vgl(3).
liby (-l y)
	The library for yacc(1).
libz (-l z)
	The general-purpose data compression library. See zlib(3).

/usr/lib/libc.a	the C library
/usr/lib/libc_p.a
	the C library compiled for profiling
/usr/lib/libm.a	the math library
/usr/lib/libm_p.a
	the math library compiled for profiling

An intro manual appeared in AT&T v7 .