CSC 271
Software I

Utilities and Internals
Instructor: Dr. Stephen Bloch
Fall, 2008

The rest of this page is copied from the last time I taught the course; many of the links don't work yet, but they will Real Soon Now!

Syllabus	Calendar	Assignments	Examples

This course meets from 11:00-11:50 AM in Science 227.

We'll use two or three textbooks for this course, as well as a lot of online documentation and some handouts.

• Unix Power Tools, by Powers, Peek, O'Reilly, and Loukides, published by O'Reilly
• C in a Nutshell, by Prinz & Crawford, also published by O'Reilly
• (optional, recommended reading) The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond, published by Addison-Wesley

My office hours are MTTh 1:00-2:15, W 10:00-12:00, and other times by appointment.

I taught this course in Fall 1994, Fall 1995, Fall 1996, Fall 1997, Fall 2005, and Fall 2007 as well, and some information and handouts are still available from those classes.

Reading assignments

The calendar lists what chapters of what textbook are relevant to which class meetings.

In the Unix Power Tools book, the first few "articles" in each chapter are usually the basic stuff you have to know, while the later "articles" in the same chapter are advanced or obscure stuff. So although I may have assigned, say, chapters 10, 12, and 14 to read for a particular day, you really only need to read the first half (or so) of each of those three chapters. Look at the "article" titles and read the ones that look interesting. This book 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.

Later in the semester, we'll switch to the C in a Nutshell textbook. Since you're all also in CSC 270 and will therefore have already seen C++, much of this will be review; you should be able to read through this book fairly quickly, watching for things that are different from C++ or Java.

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