Write a C Program without main function

In a C program main function is the entry point so it is mandatory to have a main function.

But let us see how can we write a program without main (Kind of hiding main in some obfuscated code). This post is purely out of interest to know that we can do something weird like this, just for learning.

Implementing ls command in C

We know that ls command in unix displays the list of files in a directory. It has various options to display the data in various styles and formats.

By default its implementation is part of Coreutils package, which is default package in all Linux flavours.

I want to see how we can implement its basic functionality with a simple C program.

GIT - Adding diffmerge as visual merge in git

GIT is one of the popular distributed code repositories in opensource community, especially with developers working on opensource projects like linux kernel and others.

Operations like Merge and Diff are the most irritating & tricky tasks via command line when working on large code changes. So let us see how can we add some graphical stuff for these operations when using on GIT so that we can do merging and other options very easily. 

TCPDUMP cheat sheet

Decoding hardware information of a PC

Checking out machine hardware information is no more a geeky thing of olden days where you need to go through the hardware specification documents or to open up a physical machine to find out the hardware details if the specification documents are missing. Now we have some really cool handy software tools to help us out.

I thought to make a page with some important tools which help us in decoding the hardware related information on a Linux Box. Feel free to drop a comment with the tool names I missed out in this post.

NOTE: All of them are ordered in alphabetical order and I am trying these tools on a Ubuntu machine running in virtual box. So some of the tool outputs might be displaying names likes VirtualBox and Oracle Corporation.

Uli Drepper - Basics you should know about buffer overflow

Part 1: Buffer Overflows

Connecting via SSH without password prompt

SSH is the common way to connect remote machines these days. Almost all kinds of applications use SSH in background for communicating with end machines.

But sometimes typing password repeatedly for establishing a SSH connection with the trusted end machine is quite daunting task.

Let us see how to automate the things in 3 simple steps where we can ssh to "user@host" without asking a password every time. Replace user with the username and host with the remote machine ip-address or hostname. For E.g. john@192.168.245.129

NOTE: Only do this with trusted machines.

Daemon-izing a Process in Linux

A Linux process works either in foreground or background.

A process running in foreground can interact with the user in front of the terminal. To run a.out in foreground we execute as shown below.

./a.out

When a process runs as background process then it runs by itself without any user interaction. The user can check its status but he doesn't (need to) know what it is doing. To run a.out in background we execute as shown below.

$ ./a.out &
[1] 3665

As shown above when we run a process with & at the end then the process runs in background and returns the process id (3665 in above example).

what is a DAEMON Process?
A 'daemon' process is a process that runs in background, begins execution at startup
(not neccessarily), runs forever, usually do not die or get restarted, waits for requests to arrive and respond to them and frequently spawn other processes to handle these requests.

So running a process in BACKGROUND with a while loop logic in code to loop forever makes a Daemon ? Yes and also No. But there are certain things to be considered when we create a daemon process. We follow a step-by-step procedure as shown below to create a daemon process.

1. Create a separate child process - fork() it.
Using fork() system call create a copy of our process(child), then let the parent process exit. Once the parent process exits the Orphaned child process will become the child of init process (this is the initial system process, in other words the parent of all processes). As a result our process will be completely detached from its parent and start operating in background.

pid=fork();

if (pid<0) exit(1); /* fork error */

if (pid>0) exit(0); /* parent exits */

/* child (daemon) continues */