Unix Utilities

In this project, you'll build a few different UNIX utilities, simple versions of commonly used commands like cat, ls, etc. We'll call each of them a slightly different name to avoid confusion; for example, instead of cat, you'll be implementing my-cat.

Objectives:

Re-familiarize yourself with the C programming language
Learn a little about how UNIX utilities are implemented
Learn (as a side effect) how to use a proper code editor such as emacs

my-cat

The program my-cat is a simple program. Generally, it reads a file as specified by the user and prints its contents. A typical usage is as follows:

my-cat main.c

In this case, my-cat will read the file main.c and print out its contents.

You'll need to learn how to use a few library routines from the C standard library (often called libc) to implement the source code for this program, which we'll assume is in a file called my-cat.c. All C code is automatically linked with the C library, which is full of useful functions you can call to implement your program. Learn more about the C library here and perhaps here¹.

my-grep

my-zip and my-unzip

my-sort

my-uniq

Footnotes

1: Unfortunately, there is a lot to learn about the C library, but at some point, you've just got to **read documentation** to learn what is available. Why not now, when you are young? Or, if you are old, why not now, before it's ... ahem ... too late?

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