CSCI 3294 (UNIX Power Tools):
Readings

The table below suggests readings for topics covered in class. Try to read at least one of the choices for each topic. (In many cases the readings cover more material than we discussed in class, and more than I really expect you to read. Skim for topics mentioned in class. You may find the online notes useful.) You will probably get the most out of the reading if you have ready access to a UNIX/Linux machine to experiment on.

Lecture date Topic Readings
August 29 How to find out information (man, info, and apropos)
File and filesystem basics (file permissions, commands to manipulate files and directories)
Processes and job control
August 31 Shell basics (control keys, command history, environment variables, what the shell does with what you type)
September 7 Shell customizations
I/O redirection
Pipes
September 12 Filter programs and other useful commands (find, diff, xargs, sed, awk)
  • Section 5.3 of Introduction to Linux and man pages for awk, cat, cut, diff, echo, expand, find, fmt, grep, head, less, more, paste, sed, sort, tail, tr, uniq, wc, xargs -- not reading all details, just skimming to get an idea of what the commands do
September 14 Basics of shell scripting
September 26 Text editors; vi and emacs
  • Online tutorials and help (as described in Homework 2)
September 28 Regular expressions
October 5 make
  • The following chapters from the GNU Make Manual: 1 (introduction and 1.1); 2; 3 (introduction, 3.1, and 3.2); 4 (introduction, 4.1, and 4.2); 5 (introduction, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.4); 6 (introduction, 6.1, 6.4, and 6.5); 9 (introduction, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3); 10 (introduction, 10.1, 10.2 (skim), 10.3 (skim), 10.5 (introduction only), and 10.7).
October 12 gnuplot
October 19 LaTeX
November 2 Mail in UNIX