Examples and Tools
On Unix, Unix-like and other POSIX-compatible operating systems, popular system calls are open, read, write, close, wait, execve, fork, exit, and kill. Many of today's operating systems have hundreds of system calls. For example, Linux has over 300 different calls, FreeBSD has over 500, while Plan 9 has 51.
Tools such as strace and truss allow a process to execute from start and report all system calls the process invokes, or can attach to an already running process and intercept any system call made by said process if the operation does not violate the permissions of the user. This special ability of the program is usually also implemented with a system call, e.g. strace is implemented with ptrace or system calls on files in procfs.
Read more about this topic: System Call
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