Advanced Programming in

the UNIX Environment

Week 01, Segment 3: UNIX Basics

Department of Computer Science

Stevens Institute of Technology

Jan Schaumann
[email protected]
https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

UNIX Basics: OS Design

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

System Calls and Library Functions, Standards

System Calls and Library Functions

• System calls are entry points into kernel code where their functions are implemented.
They are documented in section 2 of the manual pages (e.g. write(2)).
• Library calls are transfers to user code which performs the desired functions. They
are documented in section 3 of the manual pages (e.g. printf(3)).

Standards
• IEEE POSIX (1003.1-2008) / SUSv4

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

System Calls and Library Functions, Standards

man printf

man 3 printf

man write

man 3 write

man 2 write

man fprintf

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

System Calls and Library Functions, Standards

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/

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System Calls and Library Functions, Standards

The C Standard:
• ANSI C (X3.159-1989), aka C89, aka C90; C99 (ISO/IEC 9899); C11 (ISO/IEC 9899:2011); C17 (ISO/IEC 9899:2018);
C23 (ISO/IEC 9899:2024), [to be continued…]

Important ANSI C features:

• function prototypes
• generic pointers (void *)
• abstract data types (e.g. pid_t, size_t)

Error handling:
• meaningful return values
• errno variable
• lookup of constant error values via two convenient functions:
strerror(3) and perror(3)
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Let's write some code already!

$ ftp https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/apue-code.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf apue-code.tar.gz
$ cd apue-code/01
$ cc welcome.c
$ ./a.out
Welcome to CS631 Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, jschauma!
$

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Let's write some code already!

$ echo "CFLAGS='-Wall -Werror -Wextra'" >> ~/.shrc

$ echo "alias cc='cc \${CFLAGS}'" >> ~/.shrc

See also:
https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2017/09/useful-gcc-warning-options-not-enabled.html

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

UNIX Basics: OS Design

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

What exactly is a shell?

$ cd 01
$ more simple-shell.c
$ cc -Wall -Werror -Wextra simple-shell.c
$ ./a.out
$$ ls
$$ ls -l
$$ exit
$$ ^D
$

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Program Design

”Consistency underlies all principles of quality.”

- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Program Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

UNIX programs...
• ...are simple
• ...follow the element of least surprise
• ...accept input from stdin
• ...generate output to stdout
• ...generate meaningful error messages to stderr
• ...have meaningful exit codes
• ...have a manual page
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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

UNIX Basics: Pipes

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

UNIX Basics: Pipes

What is the longest word found on the ten most frequently retrieved English Wikipedia pages?

$ URL=“https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pageviews/2024/2024-09/pageviews-20240901-000000.gz"
for f in $(curl -L ${URL} | zgrep -i "^en " | sort -k3 -n | tail -10 |
sed -e 's/en \(.*\) [0-9]* [0-9]*/\1/'); do
links -dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/${f};
done |
tr '[:punct:]' ' ' |
tr '[:space:]' '\n' |
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep '^[a-z]+$' |
awk '{ print length() " " $0; }' | sort |
uniq |
sort -n |
tail -1

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Files and Directories

The UNIX lesystem is a tree structure, with all partitions mounted under the root (/).
File names may consist of any character except / and NUL as pathnames are a
sequence of zero or more lenames separated by /’s.

Directories are special ” les” that contain mappings between inodes and lenames,
called directory entries.

All processes have a current working directory from which all relative paths are
speci ed. (Absolute paths begin with a slash, relative paths do not.)

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fi
fi
fi
fi
fi
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Listing files in a directory

$ cd 01
$ more simple-ls.c
$ cc -Wall -Werror -Wextra simple-ls.c
$ ./a.out .
$

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User Identification

User IDs and group IDs are numeric values used to identify users on the system and
grant permissions appropriate to them.

$ whoami
$ id -un

Group IDs come in two types; primary and secondary.

$ groups
$ id [-Gn]

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Unix Time Values

Calendar time: measured in seconds since the UNIX epoch (Jan 1, 00:00:00, 1970,
GMT). Stored in a variable of type time_t.

$ date +%s
1598535631

https://www.xkcd.com/376/
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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Unix Time Values: Year 2038 Problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

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 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Unix Time Values

Process time: central processor resources used by a process.

Measured in clock ticks (clock_t). Three values:

• clock time
• user CPU time
• system CPU time

$ time nd /usr/src/usr.bin -name '*.[ch]' -exec cat {} \; | wc -l

$ time nd /usr/src/usr.bin -name '*.[ch]' -print | xargs cat | wc -l

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fi
fi
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Standard I/O

• le descriptors: Small, non-negative integers which identify a le to the kernel. The shell
can redirect any le descriptor.
• kernel provides unbu ered I/O through e.g. open(2), read(2), write(2), lseek(2),
close(2)
• kernel provides bu ered I/O through e.g. fopen(3), fread(3), fwrite(3), getc(3),
putc(3)

$ cc simple-cat.c
$ a.out
$ a.out simple-cat.c
$ a.out <simple-cat.c >/tmp/copy
$ diff -bu simple-cat.c simple-cat2.c
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fi
fi
ff
ff
fi
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Processes

• Programs executing in memory are called processes.

• Programs are brought into memory via one of the exec(3) / execve(2) functions.
• Each process is identi ed by a guaranteed unique non-negative integer called the
processes ID.
• New processes can only be created via the fork(2) system call.
• Process control is performed mainly via the fork(2), exec(3), and waitpid(2) functions.

$ proctree
$ echo $$
$ cc -Wall -Werror -Wextra pid.c
$ ./a.out
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fi
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Signals

Signals notify a process that a condition has occurred. Signals may be:
• allowed to cause the default action
• intentionally and explicitly ignored
• caught and control transferred to a user-de ned function

$ cc -Wall -Werror -Wextra simple-shell.c

$ ./a.out
^C
$ cc -Wall -Werror -Wextra simple-shell2.c

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fi
 CS631 - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

Homework

• make sure your NetBSD VM is set up

• read intro(2) and intro(7)
• read chapters 1 & 2 in Stevens as well as the linked chapter on UNIX history and
basics as you review Week 1
• review and repeat all the code exercises from this lecture segment
• read chapter 3 in Stevens to prepare for Week 2
• join the class Slack and say hi

Next week: File I/O and File Sharing

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