Shared I/O and New I/O System Calls

When multiple threads perform concurrent I/O operations with the same file descriptor, you might discover that the traditional UNIX I/O interface is not thread safe. The problem occurs with nonsequential I/O where the lseek(2) system call sets the file offset. The file offset is then used in the next read(2) or write(2) call to indicate where in the file the operation should start. When two or more threads are issuing an lseek() to the same file descriptor, a conflict results.

To avoid this conflict, use the pread() and pwrite() system calls.

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

ssize_t pread(int fildes, void *buf, size_t nbyte, off_t offset);

ssize_t pwrite(int filedes, void *buf, size_t nbyte,
    off_t offset);

pread(2) and pwrite(2) behave just like read (2) and write(2) except that pread(2) and pwrite(2) take an additional argument, the file offset. With this argument, you specify the offset without using lseek(2), so multiple threads can use these routines safely for I/O on the same file descriptor.