Unix Tools

Lecturer: Mr M.G. Kuhn (mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 4

Operating Systems (Part IA) provides a useful foundation for this course.

Aims

This non-examinable course gives students with little or no previous 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. Review of Unix history and design philosophy. Unix inter-process communication mechanisms and conventions (command-line arguments, environment variables, files, directories, plain text format, pipes, standard I/O, signals, sockets, process groups, locale). Using the shell (bash) for file system navigation, program invocation, piping and job control. Efficient command entry with history and alias functions. Finding documentation (man, info).

• Shell script programming and common tools. Regular expressions. Using the shell as a simple scripting language with parameter substitution, control structures, functions. Customising your environment with start-up scripts. Basics of X Window System configuration. Overview of common text, shell, and network utilities and their most important options.

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

• Perl and L^ATEX. Quick introduction to Perl, a powerful scripting and text manipulation language. Very quick guide to learning and using L^ATEX, the most widely used system for scientific typesetting.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

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

• appreciate how a range of simple Unix 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 under Unix

• appreciate how using revision control systems and fully automated build processes contribute to the quality and repeatability of project output

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

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

Recommended books

Robbins, A. & Gilly, D. (1999). Unix in a Nutshell. O'Reilly (3rd ed.).
Schwartz, R.L. & Christiansen, T. (1997). Learning Perl. O'Reilly (2nd ed.).
Lamport, L. (1994). L^ATEX - A Documentation Preparation System User's Guide and Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).