UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

What is Low-Level API and High-Level API?

It's hard to answer this without having seen how the phrase was used, but I'll try. API = application programming interface, which is basicly a set of routines that programmers use to do stuff. The kernel system calls are an API. The programmer can use open(), read(), write(), close(), etc to write code. And this as low level as you can get in ordinary programming. The stdio routines, fopen(), get(), put(), printf(), etc, are a somewhat higher level api. But the term, high level api, generally means something quite a bit higher. Imagine a routine like get_file_via_ftp(). That would be a high level api.