Unix Tools

Lecturer: Dr I.A. Pratt (iap10@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 4

Aims

This non-examinable course aims to give students without previous Unix experience a basic understanding of the use of the shell and some popular development utilities.

Lectures

• Overview and basics. Expected impact of this course on future CST practical work and the evaluation criteria applied to it. The Unix philosophy and history. Streams, redirection, pipes. Ways to identify information (wildcards, find, grep and the use of regular expressions). Influence of Unix tools on the non-Unix world. man pages, info pages.

• Tools to support development and testing. Makefiles and parameter substitution. Revision control systems. Important shell facilities including job control, nice and history-substitution.

• Data manipulation tools. sed, tr, diff. Why these may be useful.

• Scripting languages. Scripting with Perl, and hence more advanced linkage between tool components.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• be able to use a Unix shell to navigate and perform job control

• be able to compose simple command pipelines

• know how to make basic use of Makefiles, shell scripts, and RCS

• be aware of the existence of a range of utilities and know where to look for more information

Recommended books

Gilly, D. (1992). UNIX in a Nutshell. O'Reilly (2nd ed.).
Schwartz, R.L. & Christiansen, T. (1997). Learning Perl. O'Reilly (2nd ed.).