Call a Linux syscall from a scripting language

Perl allows this with its syscall function:

$ perldoc -f syscall
    syscall NUMBER, LIST
            Calls the system call specified as the first element of the list,
            passing the remaining elements as arguments to the system call. If
⋮

The documentation also gives an example of calling write(2):

require 'syscall.ph';        # may need to run h2ph
my $s = "hi there\n";
syscall(SYS_write(), fileno(STDOUT), $s, length $s);

Can't say I've ever used this feature, though. Well, before just now to confirm the example does indeed work.

This appears to work with getrandom:

$ perl -E 'require "syscall.ph"; $v = " "x8; syscall(SYS_getrandom(), $v, length $v, 0); print $v' | xxd
00000000: 5790 8a6d 714f 8dbe                      W..mqO..

And if you don't have getrandom in your syscall.ph, then you could use the number instead. It's 318 on my Debian testing (amd64) box. Beware that Linux syscall numbers are architecture-specific.

In Python you can use the ctypes module to access arbitrary functions in dynamic libraries, including syscall() from libc:

import ctypes

SYS_getrandom = 318 # You need to check the syscall number for your target architecture

libc = ctypes.CDLL(None)
_getrandom_syscall = libc.syscall
_getrandom_syscall.restypes = ctypes.c_int
_getrandom_syscall.argtypes = ctypes.c_int, ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_char), ctypes.c_size_t, ctypes.c_uint

def getrandom(size, flags=0):
    buf = (ctypes.c_char * size)()
    result = _getrandom_syscall(SYS_getrandom, buf, size, flags)
    if result < 0:
        raise OSError(ctypes.get_errno(), 'getrandom() failed')
    return bytes(buf)

If your libc includes the getrandom() wrapper function, you can call it too:

import ctypes

libc = ctypes.CDLL(None)
_getrandom = libc.getrandom
_getrandom.restypes = ctypes.c_int
_getrandom.argtypes = ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_char), ctypes.c_size_t, ctypes.c_uint

def getrandom(size, flags=0):
    buf = (ctypes.c_char * size)()
    result = _getrandom(buf, size, flags)
    if result < 0:
        raise OSError(ctypes.get_errno(), 'getrandom() failed')
    return bytes(buf)

Ruby has a syscall(num [, args...]) → integer function.

For example:

irb(main):010:0> syscall 1, 1, "hello\n", 6
hello
=> 6

With getrandom():

irb(main):001:0> a = "aaaaaaaa"
=> "aaaaaaaa"
irb(main):002:0> syscall 318,a,8,0
=> 8
irb(main):003:0> a
=> "\x9Cq\xBE\xD6|\x87\u0016\xC6"
irb(main):004:0>