Header file location confusion

I'm learning C programming and I don't have a background in programming. I want to control the timing of commands for a simple console program and looked up online the sleep() function. However, it requires the <unistd.h> header file. I'm using Visual Studio .Net on my work computer (because my lab has that on all computers.) However, when I put:

#include <unistd.h>

or

"#include "unistd.h" at the beginning of the program, I get the error:

fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'unistd.h': No such file or directory

So I looked up online that the unistd.h header file is part of the POSIX library as opposed to the ANSI library. Perhaps that is meaningless, I don't know.

Question 1: How do I know what header files I have access to with the Visual Studio .net software?

Question 2: Can I download unistd.h from somewhere on the web and put it somewhere so that my program will know where to access it?

thanks in advance.

I can't answer either of your two questions, but if you want to do a sleep under windows, you can use Sleep (note the S is capital).

Code:

---

#include <windows.h>
.
.
  /* Sleep for 1000 milliseconds */
  Sleep(1000);

---

Note this solution is obviously nonportable. I believe most linux flavors would have sleep and probably usleep, because as you said, these are POSIX.

Swoopy,

Thanks! That worked perfectly and solved my problem. I didn't occur to me (being a newbie) that sleep() could be in multiple header files.

If anyone can answer my previous questions about header file locations, that would be great. I would still like to better understand header files and libraries.

thanks!

You could always compile under Cygwin to access POSIX functions.

Quote:

---

If anyone can answer my previous questions about header file locations, that would be great. I would still like to better understand header files and libraries.

---

(1) I don't use Visual Studio .net, but it will certainly have all the C standard library functions. Here's a reference: http://www.cppreference.com. It will also have the Win32 API functions found in <windows.h>. There should be some documentation which accompanied it.

(2) unistd.h is typically available on linux/unix systems. There's also a FAQ entry for this question: FAQ > How do I... (Level 1) > Where can I download a missing header file?

So it seems the short answer is that the OP found an example from a UNIX system and that he is using Windows. I would guess that unistd.h is short for Unix Standard Header file and Windows.h is short for Windows (Standard) Header file. Makes sense to me amyway!!

>So it seems the short answer is that the OP found an example from a UNIX system and that he is using Windows.
That would be my guess. Stuff like sleep is platform specific. I'm using Dev-C++ right now, which has <unistd.h>, but it's missing a lot of the unix/linux functionality.