Low-level Unix wrapper types.

The Mono.Unix.Native namespace contains low-level wrapper classes, structures, and enumerations which are accessible from the and classes, which are a low-level wrappers over ANSI C, POSIX and Unix system calls and library functions.

Thread-safety wasn't handled 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.Native, 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:

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