Solved-Lab 1: -Introduction to the Unix Shell and C Programs- Solution

Description

Introduction

The purpose of this lab is to practice using a few different shell commands to navigate through the file system, review git, and compile and run simple C programs.

Before starting this lab, we strongly recommend you complete the following sections on the PCRS:

C Language Basics -> DISCOVER: Types, Variables and Assignment Statements (video 1)

C Language Basics -> DISCOVER: Input, Output and Compiling (all videos)

You’ll find the other videos in the “C Language Basics” part useful as a reference as you start working with C.

You should also have your computing environment set up (see the Software Setup page on Quercus) before starting this lab.

0. MarkUs, git, and git hooks

To start, login to MarkUs and navigate to the lab1 assignment. You’ll find your repository URL to clone. Even if you know your MarkUs repo URL, it’s important to visit the page first! This triggers the starter code for this lab to be committed to your repository.

Then, open a terminal on your computer and do a git pull in your CSC209 MarkUs repository. You should see a new folder called lab1 with some starter code inside. Make sure to do all your work on this lab in that folder.

You should also see a folder called markus-hooks . This semester, we are using a tool to help you make sure you’re using git correctly with MarkUs. A git hook is a program that runs at a specific time in the git workflow to perform specific checks about the action being run. In this course, you’ll be using a pre-commit hook to perform two checks every time you commit changes:

You may not add, delete, or modify top-level files or directories in your repository. Instead, all of your work should be done in assignment-specific subdirectories, like lab1 .

When an assignment has required files, you’ll receive a warning message if your repo is missing some of these files. If the assignment restricts your submission to only those required files, you won’t be able to commit any other files inside that assignment’s subdirectory.

Because these checks are also made by the MarkUs server when you push your code, your submission may not be accepted (the push will fail) if your changes fail to satisfy the above conditions. You can set up git hooks on your computer, so that you will be prevented from committing changes that will violate the checks:

1. OSX and Linux users only: open the file markus-hooks/pre-commit . You’ll need to modify the command inside the file to use python3 (use version 3.6 or later) rather than just plain python , which likely refers to a Python 2 interpreter.

2. In your new cloned repository, copy the file markus-hooks/pre-commit into .git/hooks :

$ cp markus-hooks/pre-commit .git/hooks

Note the period at the start of .git ; this is a hidden folder, and may or may not show up in a graphical file explorer, depending on your settings. Running the above command in a terminal is the safest approach.

3. Check your work: run ls .git/hooks . One of the files listed should be pre-commit .

1. Basic utilities

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Your first task is to inspect the contents of the lab1 folder. In the command line, use the ls command to inspect the contents of this folder. Use the man page for ls (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ls.1.html) , which we encourage you to explore the different options you can pass to ls as command-line arguments to vary its behaviour. Note that you can pass multiple command-line arguments to ls .

Play around with these options now, and see if you can do each of the following: (Note that these commands will show you both files and directories.)

1. Use -l to show metadata about each file in the current working directory.

2. Show the same metadata about each file as -l , except do not show the owner or group of the file.

3. Show only the filename and size of each file, one per line.

4. Show all files in the current working directory including the hidden files, which are files that start with a “.”

2. Compiling and running C programs

You should see a bunch of different C source code files being listed by ls . For each one, do the following:

1. Compile it by running the command gcc -Wall -std=gnu99 -g . The arguments -Wall , -std=gnu99 , and -g are the standard compiler flags we’ll be using in this course — more about these later.
2. Run it according to its usage. Note that some of the executables take no command-line arguments, some require at least one command-line argument of a certain form, and some will read in keyboard input. Try running each program and read the code to learn what each program does!

3. A simple script

Executing commands one at a time in the shell is not scalable: often we have a set of commands we want to execute together repeatedly. We can do so by writing a shell script, which is a program written in a shell programming language like bash . We’ll return to shell programming at the end of this course, but for now, you’ll write the simplest type of shell program: a list of commands.

To do this, create a new file in your lab1 directory called compile_all.sh ; you can do this using any text editor you like. The first line of the file should be the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

This line is called a shebang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_%28Unix%29) line, and is used to tell the operating system to interpret the contents of the file as a shell program.

In this file, write one line for each compilation command you ran in Part 2. If you are on Windows, you need to ensure your text editor is using Unix-style line endings (aka “LF” or “\n”) for this file.

Then in the command line, run your script just as you would any other executable:

$ ./compile_all.sh

This should fail! The operating system will not run this program because the file is not executable. On Unix the permission settings of the file determine whether a file is executable.

To change the permissions we will use the program chmod :

$ chmod a+x compile_all.sh

You can read the man page ( man chmod ) to see what arguments chmod accepts. In this case, the ‘a’ means that we want to change the permissions for all users, the ‘+’ means that we are adding permissions, and the ‘x’ means the executable permissions.

Now try running the shell script again.

If you inspect the contents of your folder using ls -l , you should see that the compilation has been successful and an executable has been produced. Unfortunately, there’s a problem: because gcc uses the default executable name a.out for the executable, each

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compilation command in your script overwrites the result of the previous step. To fix this problem, modify your script by using the -o gcc flag to produce executables whose names match the C source files, without the extension. For example, use the command

gcc -Wall -std=gnu99 -g -o hello hello.c

to compile hello.c into an executable named hello .

Then when you re-run your script, you should be able to see the resulting executables all created.

Note: this compilation script is a poor way to automate the compilation of multiple C programs in practice. Later in the term, we’ll learn about the Unix software tool make , which is the industry standard for managing compilation.

4. Redirection, pipes, and more Unix utilities

Now that we have some programs, your final task will be to review how input and output redirection work, and review some basic shell utilities. Create a second shell script called my_commands.sh that contains commands that perform each of the following tasks (each of the following should be done in just a single line, and be performed in order):

1. Run echo_arg with the command-line argument csc209 and redirect the output to the file echo_out.txt .

2. Run echo_stdin with its standard input redirected from the file echo_stdin.c .

3. Use a combination of count and the Unix utility program wc (https://linux.die.net/man/1/wc) to determine the total number of digits in the decimal representations of the numbers from 0 to 209, inclusive.
4. Use a combination of echo_stdin and ls (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ls.1.html) to print out the name of the largest file in the current directory. You can assume the largest file has a name with fewer than 30 characters.

Submission

Use git to submit your final compile_all.sh and my_commands.sh — make sure they’re inside your lab1 folder and named exactly as described in this handout, as that’s where our test scripts will be looking for them.

You do not need to submit anything for Sections 1 or 2.

IMPORTANT: make sure to review how to use git to submit your work to the MarkUs server; in particular, you need to run git push , not just git commit and git add . Watch carefully for error messages, since committing non-required files may cause the push to fail.

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