These functions invoke the operating system directly for lower-level operation than that provided by stream I/O. Low-level input and output calls do not buffer or format data.

Low-level routines can access the standard streams opened at program startup using the following predefined file descriptors.

Low-level I/O routines set the errno global variable when an error occurs. You must include STDIO.H when you use low-level functions only if your program requires a constant that is defined in STDIO.H, such as the end-of-file indicator (EOF).

_dup and _dup2 are typically used to associate the predefined file descriptors with different files.