CSC 271
Software I

Utilities and Internals
Instructor: Dr. Stephen Bloch
Fall, 2005

This course meets from 1:40-2:55 PM TTh in the Gallagher lab on the second floor of Swirbul Library. We'll use the book Unix Power Tools, by Powers, Peek, O'Reilly, and Loukides, as well as a lot of online documentation and some handouts. My office hours are Monday 11:00-2:00, Wednesday 10:00-1:00, Tuesday and Thursday 3:00-4:00.

Syllabus	Calendar	Assignments	Examples

I taught this course in Fall 1994, Fall 1995, Fall 1996, and Fall 1997 as well, and some information and handouts are still available from those classes.

Reading assignments

The calendar lists what chapters of the textbook are relevant to which class meetings. In most cases, the first few "articles" in a chapter are the basic stuff you have to know, while the later "articles" in the same chapter are advanced or obscure stuff; thus, it doesn't really make sense to assign whole chapters as reading. This textbook wasn't intended to be read sequentially, from beginning to end, so follow your nose. Anyway, by the end of the semester I'd like you to have read and understood at least half of the textbook.

On-line documentation for Unix commands

• UNIXhelp for Users (within which I particularly direct your attention to the section on shell scripts)
• man mkdir, man rmdir, man pwd
• man mv, man cp, man touch, man rm
• man ls, man du
• man tcsh (sections on file completion, history substitution, aliases, variables, command substitution, wild cards, and globbing)
• man file, man find
• man tcsh (sections on jobs, fg, bg), man ps, man kill
• man tcsh (section on umask), man chmod
• man ln
• man tcsh (sections on pushd and popd)
• info info, read that page, then hit "h" for an interactive tutorial on the "info" program. You can then use info to learn about other programs.

On-line documentation for programming tools

• info gdb (No, I don't expect you to read it all, but get started on it.)
• man flex
• info make

On-line documentation for C library functions

C high-level I/O

• man stdio, which leads to...
• man fopen (including freopen)
• man fclose
• man fprintf (including printf, sprintf)
• man fscanf (including scanf, sscanf)
• man feof
• man putc (including putchar, fputs, etc.)
• man getc (including getchar, fgets, etc.)
• man perror

C string and environment manipulation

• man getenv
• system
• man strlen
• man strcat (including strcat, strcpy, strdup, strcasecmp)
• man strspn (including strcspn)
• man strchr (including strrchr, index, rindex)
• man strtok

Low-level Unix system calls

• man open
• man creat
• man read
• man write
• man exec
• man pipe
• man fork
• man socket, man bind, man listen, man accept, man connect