All-Resident C Programs

Introduction

Normally, when a C program is linked, the resulting load module does not contain all of the support routines needed by the program. For example, before the program's main function is entered, the command line must be parsed and the argv vector created. Because the command-line parsing routine is only needed once, during program start-up, the program initialization routine dynamically loads it from the transient library and unloads it (freeing the memory it required as well) when it is no longer needed.

The rest of this chapter is divided into five sections. The first section describes the organization of the all-resident library, that is, what each collection of support routines is for and how they are grouped. The second section shows how the <resident.h> header file can be used to specify which support routines are needed by an all-resident program. The third section lists some restrictions that apply to all-resident programs. The fourth section discusses several programming considerations. The last section tells you where information about linking all-resident programs can be found in this book.