CS193D Handout 03

Autumn 2000 September 28, 2000

Section Agenda
Sections meet Thursdays in Gates B01 for an hour and fifteen minutes starting at 4:15pm.
This week we’ll cover some of the basics of using the Leland UNIX environment to edit,
compile, and submit your programs:

ð Logging in, class directory, starter files

If you find that you need more individualized help getting started, be sure to come to
office hours this week or early next week. We’ll have plenty of time to help you before
the mad rush of assignments begins. Office hours will be posted to the web site over the
weekend, after CS193D TAs have finalized their own academic schedules.

Getting Started
You'll need a leland account to submit the assignments for this class. If you don't
already have an account, talk to the consultants on the second floor of Sweet Hall to
open one.

In addition to submitting, most of you will probably do all of your development on the
leland systems. The tools on the UNIX machines are very good, although somewhat
more difficult to get started with. Although we will be able to offer some support for
those of you using Microsoft Visual C++ for the PC and Metrowerks CodeWarrior for
the Macintosh, I suggest you use the UNIX tools wherever possible. Even though ANSI
C++ is highly portable, we will be grading your submissions on the leland systems, so it
is your responsibility to make sure that your program written on platform X works
there as well. In addition, working on the leland machines makes your files available
from any remote machine and backs up your work each night.

Once you've logged on, you'll find yourself in your home directory. Here's a quick
overview of changing directories, creating directories, and copying files. If you're
completely new to UNIX, it would probably be a good idea to stop by office hours next
week, so that one of us can show you around. There are also several good quick
reference sheets at Sweet Hall located near the consulting desk.
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You can create a new directory for all of your projects with the following (text that you
type is bold):

saga5:~> mkdir cs193d

and then change to the directory with

saga5:~> cd cs193d
saga5:~/cs193d>

Notice that the prompt changes to reflect the directory you are currently working in.
The saga5 part indicates the name of the machine I'm currently logged into, but there's
nothing particularly special about this host.

The directory for class materials is /usr/class/cs193d/. In here you'll find starter files
which we provide for the assignments. You'll also find code samples. Let's copy one of
the sample programs over to your newly-created 193D directory:

saga5:~/cs193d> cd /usr/class/cs193d/assignments
saga5:/usr/class/cs193d> ls
hw0/
saga5:/usr/class/cs193d> cp -r hw0 ~/cs193d

The last command copies all of the files in the sample directory recursively (-r) into
your cs193d directory ( ~ is the same as your home directory, whatever it may be).

Now, we've copied the sample directory over to your own cs193d directory.

Later when it's time to start working on the assignments, you'll copy the starting files
from /usr/class/cs193d/assignments the same way.) You can get to your copy of the
sample directory this way:

saga5:/usr/class/cs193d> cd ~/cs193d/hw0
saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> ls
Makefile main.cc stack.cc stack.h
saga5:~/cs193d/hw0>

Now that you've copied these files over, you can start editing the source code and
compiling the program.

Editing Files
There are a number of editors you can use in the UNIX environment, but we'll just go
through a brief overview of the most popular, emacs. Although it's incredibly powerful
and really nice to use once you've figured it out, emacs can be a bit intimidating at first.
If you go to Sweet Hall to work (or run an X server on your local machine), you can run
emacs in a graphical mode, or better yet, use its sister program xemacs. Both emacs and
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xemacs support plain old telnet

To run emacs, you just type emacs at the prompt (or xemacs for, surprisingly enough,
xemacs):

saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> xemacs

This brings up the program. At Sweet Hall, a new window will pop up for the program.
If you're running it over telnet, it will just take over the telnet window. You can open a
file for editing by using the Files|Open File... menu, or you can type C-x C-f (where C is
the control key) and then the name of the file you want. If that seems a bit cryptic, it is.
If you're new to this, you'll find it easier if you use the menus at first and then gradually
introduce the keyboard shortcuts into your routine until you don’t need the menus at
all.

To open a file for editing on the command line when you start the program, just type
the name(s) of the file(s):

saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> xemacs main.cc

This brings up xemacs with main.cc already in it. Here's a little tip if you work at Sweet
Hall or run an X server: typing an ampersand at the end of a command puts it in the
background and frees up the shell for other tasks. Otherwise, the shell is tied up with
xemacs and you don't get the prompt back.

saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> xemacs main.cc &

If you try this when you're running emacs in a telnet window, however, the program is
immediately suspended and it looks as if it didn't start at all.

Now you have the sample C++ program open for editing. You can take a look at the
code, and make changes to it if you want to. If you look over main.cc, you’ll quickly
notice that it is definitely not a C program. Don’t worry about the details for now; the
main thing to recognize is that an ordinary C compiler will not compile main.cc. This
may prove useful for some of you in testing whether or not your own compiler is
handling C++ code correctly.
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Compiling
Now the real fun begins. If you've used Makefiles in other classes, then there's really
nothing new to learn here. For each of the assignments we will provide you with a
Makefile for the project (although in some cases you may need to add your own files to
the SRCS line). To compile with a Makefile, go to the directory which contains the
source files and the Makefile itself, and run make:

saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> make
/usr/newsw/bin/g++ -g -Wall -MM main.cc stack.cc > Makefile.dependencies
/usr/newsw/bin/g++ -g -Wall -c -o main.o main.cc
/usr/newsw/bin/g++ -g -Wall -c -o stack.o stack.cc
/usr/newsw/bin/g++ -o foo main.o stack.o
saga5:~/cs193d/hw0>

If all goes well, you'll get a few lines of intermediate output but no warnings or errors.
If none of the source files have changed since the last compile, make will let you know
(this often comes up when you forget to save your changes before recompiling).

The g++ above refers to the Gnu C Compiler, gcc. It's actually both a C and C++
compiler (aside: C++ is a strict superset of C), but if you invoke it as g++ you have a
better chance of getting it to recognize your C++ code as such (as opposed to C code)
and linking against the right libraries. If you stick to using the Makefiles that we
provide, then you won't need to worry about this issue (at least, not for now). If you
have questions about how to edit Makefiles, email us at the question queue and we’ll be
happy to help you.

To clean up your workspace (delete .o object files, etc.) run make clean. The submission
script described below will require you to do this before turning in your work.

Submitting
Before you submit your program you will need to write a README file that describes
your submission. In it, you should describe how to run your program, and note any
extra features and bugs (if any).

Once you've finished writing your program, there's just one more step you need to
complete: electronic submission. Fortunately, it's very simple. Our submit program is

To submit your hw0, you should do this in the directory where your code lives:

saga5:~/cs193d/hw0> /usr/class/cs193d/bin/submit

Answer the questions when prompted. The submission script checks your files, makes
sure you included a README and cleaned up your project with make clean, and then
copies the files over to our submission area:
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When the script asks for the directory where your files are located and you are running
the script from your working directory, you can just type . (a single period—it's a
shorthand for the current directory).

If after submitting you decide that you need to make some additional changes, you can
run the submit program again and send us the new version of your code. We will look
at the last submission we receive from you (and we'll determine the number of late days
based on when you turned in the last submission).

The submission script will let you know how your attempt turned out. If you're getting
repeated failures and you're not sure why, send email to the course staff and we'll help
you out.