Unix Tools

Lecturer: Dr M.G. Kuhn

No. of lectures: 6

Operating Systems provides a useful foundation for this course.

Aims

This non-examinable course gives students with little Unix/Linux experience a basic understanding of the use of the shell and some popular development utilities. These skills will be important for future practical CST project work.

Lectures

• Unix background and shell basics. Unix history and design philosophy. Inter-process communication mechanisms and conventions (command-line arguments, environment variables, files, directories, plain text format, pipes, standard I/O, signals, process groups, locale). Using the shell (bash) for file system navigation, program invocation, piping and job control. Finding documentation.

• Shell script programming and configuration. Efficient command entry with history and alias functions. Regular expressions. The shell as a simple scripting language with parameter substitution, control structures, functions. Customising user environment with start-up scripts. Basics of X Window System configuration. Some notes on PWF Linux.

• Common tools Overview of common text, shell, and network utilities and their most frequently used options.

• Software development tools. C compiler, linker and debugger. Makefiles, packaging and compression tools, patch generation and application, revision control systems (RCS, CVS).

• Perl. Overview of a powerful scripting and text manipulation language.

• L^ATEX. Brief guide to learning and using the most popular tool for scientific typesetting.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• be confident in performing routine user tasks on a POSIX system, understand command-line user-interface conventions and know how to find more detailed documentation

• appreciate how a range of simple tools can be combined with little effort in pipes and scripts to perform a large variety of tasks

• be familiar with the most common tools, file formats and configuration practices used

• appreciate how using revision control systems and fully automated build processes helps to maintain reproducibility and audit trails during software development

• know enough about basic development tools to be able to install and modify openly available C source code

• have some idea of the capabilities of Perl and L^ATEX

Recommended books

* Lamport, L. (1994). L^ATEX - a documentation preparation system user's guide and reference manual. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
Robbins, A. & Gilly, D. (1999). Unix in a nutshell. O'Reilly (3rd ed.).
Schwartz, R.L. & Phoenix, T. (2001). Learning Perl. O'Reilly (3rd ed.).