Free Ebook on Unix Computer Programming : Introduction to Unix.pdf

The Operating System

Unix is a layered operating system. The innermost layer is the hardware that provides the services for the OS. The operating system, referred to in Unix as the kernel, interacts directly with the hardware and provides the services to the user programs. These user programs don't need to know anything about the hardware. They just need to know how to interact with the kernel and it's up to the kernel to provide the desired service. One of the big appeals of Unix to programmers has been that most well written user programs are independent of the underlying hardware, making them readily portable to new systems.

User programs interact with the kernel through a set of standard system calls. These system calls request services to be provided by the kernel. Such services would include accessing a file: open close, read, write, link, or execute a file; starting or updating accounting records; changing ownership of a file or directory; changing to a new directory; creating, suspending, or killing a process; enabling access to hardware devices; and setting limits on system resources.

Unix is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system. You can have many users logged into a system simultaneously, each running many programs. It's the kernel's job to keep each process and user separate and to regulate access to system hardware, including cpu, memory, disk and other I/O devices............more

There are numerous text processing utilities available with Unix, as is noted throughout this document (e.g., ed, ex, sed, awk, the grep family, and the roff family). Among the editors, the standard "visual" (or fullscreen) editor on Unix is vi. It comprises a super-set, so to speak, of ed and ex (the Unix line editors) capabilities.

Vi is a modal editor. This means that it has specific modes that allow text insertion, text deletion, and command entering. You leave the insert mode by typing the key. This brings you back to command mode. The line editor, ex, is incorporated within vi. You can switch back and forth between full-screen and line mode as desired. In vi mode type Q to go to ex mode. In ex mode at the : prompt type vi to return to vi mode. There is also a read-only mode of vi, which you can invoke as view.

Another editor that is common on Unix systems, especially in college and university environments, is emacs (which stands for "editing macros"). While vi usually comes with the Unix operating system, emacs usually does not. It is distributed by The Free Software Foundation. It is arguably the most powerful editor available for Unix. It is also a very large software system, and is a heavy user of computer system resources.

The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project (of which emacs is a part) were founded by Richard Stallman and his associates, who believe (as stated in the GNU Manifesto) that sharing software is the "fundamental act of friendship among programmers." Their General Public License guarantees your rights to use, modify, and distribute emacs (including its source code), and was specifically designed to prevent anyone from hoarding or turning a financial profit from emacs or any software obtained through the Free Software Foundation. Most of their software, including emacs, is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ and http://www.gnu.org/.

Both vi and emacs allow you to create start-up files that you can populate with macros to control settings and functions in the editors.

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