Operating systems and UNIX Introduction
This lab exercise is meant to give you an opportunity to learn a bit about UNIX
and to consider the
differences between operating systems. It is due at the beginnig of
class Wednesday, September 17.
Tasks
1) Please read the chapter entitled the UNIX operating system that we
have handed out.
2) Please go through the examples on the operation of UNIX
from our lecture on
Operating Systems.
3) Read through and play with the commands in the Chapter 1: UNIX for
Beginners (from The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernigan and Pike,
1984) that we handed out.
4) Launch xemacs and answer the following questions related to and from Kernighan and
Pike:
a) What is the difference between the kernel and the shell?
b) Exercises 4, 5, 6.
c) Explain how to launch netscape and then how to figure out its process
or job number and then how you would kill that job if it were acting up?
Be sure to save the file from xemacs!
d) Use the UNIX Manual pages to figure out what the command cat does:
man cat. Explain it briefly.
5) In a separate xemacs file, explain what you see as the pluses and
minuses of the three operating systems that you now have experience with.
Be sure to save the file from xemacs!
6) Redirect the output from the following commands into a single file
(use the man pages to figure out what these are doing if you need to):
whoami
date
cat file1 (where file1 is the file that you wrote in step 4 above)
cat file2 (where file2 is the file that you wrote in step 5 above)
history
Look at the results using more or xemacs.
cat the final file and redirect output using a pipe to the mail command
and mail it to yourself and to glg490@asu.edu.
Pages maintained by
Prof. Ramón Arrowsmith
Pages last modified on Tues Sept 2 1997.