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
September 2 How to find out information (man, info, and apropos)
File and filesystem basics (file permissions, commands to manipulate files and directories)
  • Section 3 of Introduction to Linux
  • Chapter 2 in Thinking in Unix
  • Chapters 1, 7, 8, 10, 14, 50 in Unix Power Tools
Processes and job control
September 14 Shell basics (control keys, command history, environment variables) and customizations (aliases and functions)
September 16 I/O redirection and pipes
September 21 Filter programs and other useful commands (find, diff, xargs, sed, awk)
  • 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
  • Chapter 3 in Thinking in Unix (skim the online references too)
  • Chapters 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 34 in Unix Power Tools
September 23 Basics of shell scripting
  • Part 1 (chapters 1, 2), part 2 (chapters 3, 5, 7), part 3 (chapters 9, 10, 11, 14) of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, and/or sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, 6.8 of the GNU Bash Reference Manual
  • Chapters 7, 8, 9 in Thinking in Unix
  • Chapters 27, 28, 30, 31, 35 in Unix Power Tools
October 5 Text editors; vi and emacs
  • Online tutorials and help (as described in Homework 3)
  • Chapter 5 in Thinking in Unix (and online tutorial for emacs)
  • Chapters 17, 18, 19 in Unix Power Tools
October 7 Regular expressions
October 12 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 14 LaTeX