As applications become increasingly data hungry and RAM prices continue to drop, the cross-over point from 32- to 64-bit architectures is approaching quickly. Already Microsoft has announced that several of its server-based applications will be released only on x64 bit platforms in the future. Linux, with its prominent role in on servers, will be at the leading edge of this transition, and so Linux developers should be thinking now about writing new code for the 64-bit platform. Under this scenario, the 32-bit version of the software would be derived from the x64 codebase. This article discusses the salient aspects of writing apps for x64 Linux...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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