CS214 (Advanced Unix Tools), Spring 2008

MWF 12:20-1:10 PM, Phillips Hall 213

Course description

A focus on GNU Linux/Unix as a programming environment for people with a basic knowledge of Linux/Unix and experience programming in at least one language. Projects cover advanced shell scripts (bash) Makefiles, programming and debugging tools for C and other languages, networking in Linux and network tools, and more modern scripting languages such as Perl and Python. Students with little or no experience with Unix should take CS114 first.

CS214 is a four week, one credit, S/U only course. It runs February 18 to March 14, 2008. The drop deadline is 2/25/08, one week into the course. The course number is: 706-528. To add this course (if you have not done so already), you will need to go to the Engineering School Registrar, take an add form, go to Upson 303 and get the form stamped.

Instructor

Ymir Vigfusson

Email: ymir + cs.cornell.edu (replace + with @)

Office hours: By Appointment Only

Grading and course policies

There will be no official textbook for this course; below you may find some books and websites that might be helpful. There are many books on this subject, so pick your favorite one. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this course.

There will be 2 homework assignments and a 24-hour take-home final exam. You must complete all these assignments to pass this class. Please take a look at Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Please follow these guidelines when submitting your work.

Announcements

Most recent first:

• 3/14/2008: I will release grades for homework 2 and the take-home final at some point during spring break. Please look for comments in CMS for details about your grade for an assignment. Also, please fill out the course evaluations survey on CMS. Thank you for attending the course and have a nice spring break! CS214, over and out.
• 3/10/2008: The takehome exam will be released after class (1:10) on Wednesday 3/12 and due 24-hours later on CMS. For convenience, a second batch will be released on Thursday 3/13 at 2pm and due in CMS after after class at 2pm on Friday. Pick the day that's more convenient for you. Remember that no cooperation or discussions are allowed about the exam. Instead, you can e-mail me if you have questions, I will propose a point deduction for a hint, which you can then either accept or decline.
• 3/1/2008: The second homework is out. It is due in a week (March 8th).
• 3/1/2008: Please respond to the CMS survey on what the exam format should be like (in-class, take-home or contest).
• 2/27/2008: Congratulations to the winner (team5) of the contest. The problems are available here. Thanks to everyone who participated, hope you had fun!
• 2/25/2008: Next lecture (Wed 27th) will be in Blue room of the ACCEL lab on the second floor of the Engineering Library (Carpenter Hall).
• 2/25/2008: Today is the final drop deadline. Go to Upson 303 to get a stamp if you wish to drop the course.
• 2/17/2008: The first homework is out.
• 2/17/2008: The people on my enrollment list have been added to CMS. If you are unable to access the CS214 course, please e-mail me as soon as possible. We will use CMS to manage homeworks and projects for the course.
• 2/12/2008: Welcome to Advanced UNIX! For those of you who are curious to see what CS114 UNIX Tools covers, please take a look at the web pages for 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004. In the Advanced UNIX class you will study shell scripting in more detail, and become familiar with writing scripts to automate everyday tasks. The goal of this class is for you to become familiar with writing scripts and gain experience by means of examples. We will cover bash scripting, basic programming using Python (and Perl), and makefiles.

Lectures and Schedule

• Lecture 1 [02/18]: Scripting and the Bash Shell. Regular expressions. [from spring 2005]
• Lecture 2 [02/20]: Basic commands used in shell scripts, and regular expressions [from 2005]. We wrote a script that parses a datafile and produces a cumulative frequency plot (indicating a power-law distribution).
• Lecture 3 [02/22]: Conditionals and tests, and Loops [from 2005]. We wrote a script to automatically create thumbnails of JPEG pictures in a folder.
• Lecture 4 [02/25]: Functions [from 2005]. Processes and jobs. Formatting output. Scheduling tasks using crontab. We looked at the /etc/init.d/rc script in Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
• Lecture 5 [02/27]: In-class shell scripting contest. Final standings. Problems.
• Lecture 6 [02/29]: David Reed's Python Primer. We looked at Peter Norvig's 100-line Python script to solve Sudoku puzzles.
• Lecture 7 [03/03]: More Python.
• Lecture 8 [03/05]: Basic Perl scripting [from 2005]. Regular expressions in Perl [from troubleshooters.com] and another take on regular expressions [from RPI]. We looked at a simple Perl script to automatically vote in an online poll.
• Lecture 9 [03/07]: Networking. We talked a little bit about security by exploiting this hypothetical server, spawned by nc -vlp 5000 -c ./server.sh.
• Lecture 10 [03/10]: More networking. Documents. We looked at built in Python modules to simplify server code such as this timeserver and this webserver.
• Lecture 11 [03/12]: Basic C programming. Compiling and linking using Makefiles. The GNU Debugger (gdb). Smashing the stack (buffer overflows), Format string vulnerabilities and other security considerations in C. We saw what happens when people have too much free time on their hands: behold Arkanoid written in sed.
• Lecture 12 [03/14]: System administration and various Linux tidbits. We saw how to use dosemu and wine to emulate programs, and a trick to change a forgotten root password.

Assignments