Intro To UNIX Software Development

INTRO

Notes on Slides

These slides were developed for the Introduction to UNIX Software Development course offered at MIT during IAP 1999. They are meant to be used both as slides to complement the lecture and also as a reference. As a result, their structure is more an outline than a tutorial. The outline for this course was developed by Erik Nygren (nygren@mit.edu) and Mike Whitson (mwhitson@mit.edu) for IAP 1995 and was revised and converted to HTML by Erik Nygren. Additional slides on CVS and Autoconf were created by Sam Hartman (hartmans@mit.edu) for IAP 1999.

Why Software Development Environments?

Simplify the development of scalable and maintainable applications ranging from small utilities to massive systems
It would be possible to have everything in one big .c file, but this would make it more difficult to maintain and recompile
Enables team development efforts

UNIX as a programming environment (compared to integrated environments under Windows or the MacOS)

Advantages of developing under UNIX

powerful
less GUI
portability
tons of features added over many years

Disadvantages

less GUI (intimidating)
steep learning curve
tons of features added over many years

What we plan to cover

This course will primarily cover C as it is the most widely used language under UNIX. Many of these techniques apply to other programming languages, such as C++ and Java, and even to word processing with LaTeX
The compilation process
C programming with multiple files
Using GDB, the GNU debugger
Some tools to make life easier
Makefiles to automate processes like compiling
Using RCS to manage revisions and lock files
Build trees and multi-platform support
Emacs as an integrated environment
CVS as a revision control system for managing projects
Autoconf for making software more portable

We'll cover GNU versions (where available)

GNU software is all freely available (source on prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu)
Superset/subset of what's offered by vendors
Available for almost all platforms and OS's so portable

Prepared by Erik Nygren (nygren@mit.edu), Sam Hartman (hartmans@mit.edu), and Mike Whitson (mwhitson@mit.edu)