Computer Laboratory – Course material 2007

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Unix Tools

Lecturer: Dr M.G. Kuhn

No. of lectures: 10

Operating Systems provides a useful foundation for this course.

Aims

This non-examinable course provides students with little Unix/Linux experience some important practical skills in using the Unix shell as an efficient working environment. It also introduces some popular software-engineering tools for working in teams, as well as formatting and data-analysis tools for preparing dissertations and scientific publications. These skills are essential not only for future practical CST projects, but for participating effectively in most real-world software projects.

Lectures

Unix background and shell basics. Brief review of 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. Customizing user environments 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.
Revision control systems. Patch generation and application, RCS, Subversion.
Perl. Introduction to a powerful scripting and text manipulation language. [2 lectures]
L^ATEX. Typesetting basics, introduction to the most popular tool for scientific document formatting. [2 lectures]
Number crunching and data visualization. Use of MATLAB on PWF machines.

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
be able to understand, write, and maintain shell scripts and makefiles
appreciate how using revision control systems and fully automated build processes help to maintain reproducibility and audit trails during software development
know enough about basic development tools to be able to install and modify C source code
have gained experience in using Perl, L^ATEX and MATLAB

Recommended reading

* Lamport, L. (1994). L^ATEX - a documentation preparation system user's guide and reference manual. Addison-Wesley (2nd ed.).
Robbins, A. (2005). Unix in a nutshell. O'Reilly (4th ed.).
Schwartz, R.L. & Phoenix, T. (2005). Learning Perl. O'Reilly (4th ed.).

Next: Lent Term 2008: Part Up: Michaelmas Term 2007: Part Previous: Software Engineering Contents