Student's Guide to C and Unix
[1]Most of this guide has been put together by past Graduate Research Assistants Hrishikesh Joshi and Nikhil Junankar.

Abstract:

This document's objective is to provide preliminary introduction to Unix and C programming for students taking the Algorithms course offered at Georgia State University. The first section provides a basic introduction to UNIX commands. The second section provides details of the utilities available to write, compile and execute a C program. Later sections include suggestions for debugging and performance tuning of a program. Last section contains an example C program with appropriate library calls to find the execution time of a portion of code on randomly generated input.

• Contents
• Introduction to UNIX
  • Logging on to cheetah
  • Directory structure.
  • File and Directory Manipulation
    • Commands to manipulate a directory
    • Commands to manipulate a file
    • Commands to set the access permissions for files and directories
• Compiling and Running C Programs
  • Compiling
  • Running Programs
  • Execution Monitoring
• Debugging tools
  • Debugging the core dumps:
  • Following are possible causes of a core dump:
  • Debugging infinite loops:
  • Following are the possible causes of an infinite loop:
  • Some useful hints to debug programs:
• Performance Enhancing Tools
  • Handling your Programs Efficiently: The Make Utility:
    • Preparing the Makefile:
  • Improving the Efficiency of your Programs - Pixie and Prof
    • Pixie Utility
    • Prof Utility
      • Example:
• An Example C Program
• About this document ...