High-level Unix wrapper types.

The Mono.Unix namespace contains high-level wrapper classes, which provide .NET naming and usage conventions over the low-level and functionality. If an exception is generated due to an operating system-level error (as opposed to invalid arguments or some fully managed reason), the exception thrown will either inherit from , or the property will be a type inheriting from UnixIOException. In either case, the property will contain the underlying error number that generated the exception. This error number can be used to look up additional information if necessary. Thread-safety wasn't considered in the original Unix API. While some degree of thread-safety is provided from managed code, it is impossible to provide full thread-safety for interactions between managed and unmanaged code. For example, if you DllImport into a C library which uses non-thread-safe Unix functions which are also exposed in Mono.Unix, you may have threading issues including, but not limited to, memory corruption. An effort is made to provide thread-safety from managed code, but it is impossible to know all dependencies for all potential Unix-like platforms. For example, is thread-safe? It appears to be under glibc, but isn't necessarily under all Unix platforms. Mono.Unix.Native.Stdlib assumes that it is. Only obviously unsafe exports are actually synchronized from managed code, such as and . Documentation is based upon the FreeBSD man pages, which is under the following copyright: Copyright (c) 1980, 1983, 1986, 1991, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.