The Linux Environment Programming with C CSCI 112, Spring 2015 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Linux Environment

Programming with C

CSCI 112, Spring 2015

Patrick Donnelly

Montana State University

Linux Flavors

There are many different distributions of the Linux operating

• systems. Some of the most popular are as follows:
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• CentOS
• Mint
• Debian

The distro used in the lab here on campus is Fedora.

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A Brief History of Unix

1964 1969 1970 1971 1972 1975 1979 MIT, GE, and Bell Labs develop Multics (“Multiplexed Information and Computing Service”), an influential early time-sharing operating system. Thompson, Ritchie, Canaday developed a hiercrachical file system at Bell Labs. Peter Neumann coined the project name UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service), a pun on Multics. The UNIX Programmer’s Manual was published on 3 November 1971. Unix was rewritten in the (new) C programming language. Sixth edition; Bourne shell is introduced. Seventh edition of Unix released.

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Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie working together at a PDP-11.

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A Brief History of Unix

1983 1987 1990 1991 1994 1996 2003 2004 AT&T licenses System V - first commercial version of UNIX. Justice Department mandates breakup of the Bell System. GNU project is announced by Richard Stallman. Sun and AT&T cooperated to develop Unix System V R4. Open Software Foundation released OSF/1. Sun unveils Solaris 2 operating environment. Linux is introduced by Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland. Red Hat Linux is introduced. KDE development began by Matthias Ettrich. Fedora, Debian released. First release of Ubuntu

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Vision for Unix

What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication. Dennis Ritchie, 1979

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Shell

Each Linux distribution has it’s own unique software and changes to the visual style. In the end however, they all share a virtually identical shell that runs “under the hood”.

• The shell prompt is a text-based interface
• With it you can perform most all tasks you would with a GUI
• It is similar to Windows’ command line, but more robust

In this course, we will do most of our work using the shell.

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File System

• The Linux file system works like it does on Windows or Mac
• Each directory can contain files or other directories
• When browsing through these directories, the current

directory you have open is called the “working directory”

• With shell, contents of your working directory are not shown

by default, you must explicitly request that they be listed

• To list directories, use the ls command
• To change directories (i.e. open another folder), use the cd

command, followed by the target directory

• Note that in any directory, “.” is the name of the current

directory, “..” is the name of the parent directory, and “-” is the name of the previously visited directory

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Creating Files and Directories

• To create a file, use the touch command followed by the name
• f the file to create.
• To create a directory, use the mkdir commmand followed by

the name of the directory you wish to create.

• To quickly view the contents of a file, use the cat command

followed by the name of the file you wish to view.

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Text Editors

The following is a list of text editors in order of learning difficulty. Nano

• Usage: nano filename.txt
• Nano is a minimalistic text editor, but is easy to learn for

first-time Linux users. Emacs

• Usage: emacs filename.txt
• Emacs has a steeper learning curve, but has many excellent

features for programming. Vim

• Usage: vim filename.txt
• Similar to Emacs, Vim has many nice features but it is more

difficult to learn.

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