COMS 214 (Advanced Unix Tools), Spring 2004
MWF 12:20-13:10, Upson 205
COMS 214 is a four week, one credit, S/U only course. It runs
February 23 to March 19, 2004. The drop
deadline is March 1st, one week into the course. The
course prerequisites are a programming course (COMS 100) and
an introductory Unix course (COMS 114), or equivalent.
From the course catalog description: "A focus on Unix as a
programming environment for people with a basic knowledge of
Unix and experience programming in at least one
language. Projects cover advanced shell scripts (sh, ksh, csh),
Makefiles, programming and debugging tools for C and other
languages, and more modern scripting languages such as Perl and
Python."
In practice, the plan is to spend two weeks discussing shell
scripting for a particular shell (bash), and two weeks
discussing Perl.
Here's the syllabus, which really
just repeats the info from here.
Instructor
Riccardo Pucella
Announcements
(Most recent first)
- 4/22/2004: Third homework graded (finally!) and
available for pickup outside my office, Upson 5151. I've also
got the final grades (that is, pass or fail) if you're
interested. Just drop me an email. Have a good end of term,
and an great follow-up summer.
- 3/17/2004: Bit that can be helpful for HW3, if you
decide to do it in Perl. While in shell scripts you access
command line arguments (that is, arguments to the script)
using $1, $2, etc, in Perl, the arguments
are passed in the array @ARGV. Thus, the first
argument of a Perl script is in $ARGV[0], the second
is in $ARGV[1], and so on.
- 3/17/2004: Extension for HW3. You can submit HW3
until monday after spring break, that is, monday the 29th,
before midnight.
- 3/17/2004: Submission instructions for
homework 3. First, create a directory cs214-HW3/ in
your home directory, and put your script named
build in that directory. Then, execute
~cs214/bin/submit-hw3. That will take your
file cs214-HW3/build and submit it to me.
- 3/12/2004: Homework 3 is out. Due next friday, 3/19/2004
- 3/10/2004: Submission instructions for
homework 2. First, create a directory cs214-HW2/ in
your home directory, and put your script named
todo in that directory. Then, execute
~cs214/bin/submit-hw2. That will take your
file cs214-HW2/todo and submit it to me.
- 3/5/2004: Homework 2 is out. Due next friday. Start
early is my advice.
- 3/3/2004: Here are the submission instructions for
homework 1. First, create a directory cs214-HW1/ in
your home directory, and put your script named
traverse in that directory. Then, execute
~cs214/bin/submit-hw1. That will basically take your
file cs214-HW1/traverse and pass it along to
me.
- 2/27/2004: Homework 1 is out. Due next friday. While
you should definitely start thinking about it over the
weekend, the intricacies of doing recursion with shell scripts
will be discussed on monday.
- 2/27/2004: If you want to connect to babbage from
outside the CSUG lab, you need to use ssh.
PuTTY
is a reasonable ssh client for Windows, if you need one.
- 2/25/2004: Accounts for (most) students have been
created. "Users with new accounts need to reset their
passwords here. See here for how to connect to your Unix account. It turns out we have another machine available, faster than babbage, called turing (sense a theme here?). The full address of the machine is turing.csuglab.cornell.edu.
Lectures
Homeworks
Useful links
Books
The following books are useful:
UNIX Shells by Example, (2nd ed), E. Quigley, Prentice Hall,
2000. An excellent survey of the available shell families;
covers both interactive and scripting uses.
UNIX in a Nutshell, A. Robbins, O'Reilly, 1999. A
good reference for UNIX in general.
Programming Perl, (3rd ed), L. Wall, T. Christiansen, and
J. Orwant, O'Reilly, 2000. The classic introduction to Perl.
All books are optional.
Last modified: Thu Apr 22 22:53:23 EDT 2004