CS2042 (Unix Tools), Spring 2009

MWF 12:20-1:10 PM, Phillips Hall 203

Course description

An introduction to Unix, emphasizing tools for file management, communication, process control, managing your Unix environment, and rudimentary shell scripts. Knowledge of at least one programming lanugauge is encouraged. Assignments assume no previous knowledge of Unix or expertise in any particular language..

CS242 is a four week, one credit, S/U only course. It runs September 28 to October 23, 2009. The drop deadline is 10/5/09, one week into the course. The course number is: 5737.

Instructor

David Slater

Email: dms236 + cornell.edu (replace + with @)

Office hours: By Appointment Only

Grading and course policies

There will be no official textbook for this course; below you may find some books and websites that might be helpful. There are many books on this subject, so pick your favorite one. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this course.

There will be 3 (most likely) homework assignments. You must complete all these assignments to pass this class. Please take a look at Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Please follow these guidelines when submitting your work.

Announcements

Most recent first:

• 9/28/2009: Welcome to CS2042!
• 10/21/2009: Class in Friday is in Upson 361

Lectures

• 9/28/2009 Lecture 1 Unix History and Moving Around

• 9/30/2009 Lecture 2 File Permissions and Plaintext

• 10/2/2009 Lecture 3 Making The BASH Shell Work For You.

• 10/5/2009 Lecture 4 Processes and Jobs.

• 10/7/2009 Lecture 5 Grep and Regular Expressions.

• 10/9/2009 Lecture 6 tr and sed.

• 10/14/2009 Lecture 7 Grok Gawk and Intro to Shell Scripts.

• 10/16/2009 Lecture 8 Shell Scripting.

• 10/19/2009 Lecture 9 Loops.

• 10/21/2009 Lecture 10 Functions, Find and more.

• 10/23/2009 In class programming contest. Final Standings. Problems.

Homework

• 9/30/2009 Homework 1 Due Monday October 5th CMS

• 10/7/2009 Homework 2 Due Wednesday October 14th CMS

• 10/15/2009 Homework 3 Due Wednesday October 21st at 11:59pm on CMS. Here is a copy of Frankenstein to test your script on.

Very Useful links

• UNIX shells and scripts
  • Bash Reference Manual (for version 2.03)
  • Bash man page on babbage
  • Man page viever on babbage

Useful books

• UNIX Shells by Example (2nd ed), E. Quigley, Prentice Hall,2000
  • excellent presentation of all five leading UNIX shells: C, Bourne, Korn, Bash, and tcsh; also covers three main utilities in UNIX: grep (for searching), sed (for editing), and awk (for scripting).
• UNIX in a Nutshell, A. Robbins, O'Reilly, 1999
• good general reference, contains alphabetized listing of core UNIX commands, and documentation on editors like Emacs, ex and vi, among others

Miscellaneous

• 2/12/2008: One of the many links discussing scripting languages (WWW Journal, vol.2, spring '97)
• 2/12/2008: UNIX history as experienced by its creators: Dennis Ritchie's webpage