Useful Unix Utils

Herein you will find a variety of utility programs commonly available on Unix systems and some notes as to why you might want to use them. You can, of course, learn more about each by using man.

Simple Text Utilities

tr - translate characters

tr is useful for character-based code modifications. It lets you do single-character changes or deletions (for every character in a set).

• tr -d string1 - Deletes every character in string1 from stdin
• tr 'a' 'A'

Scripting Languages

perl - practical extraction and report language

A hugely powerful language, originally designed as a tool for sysadmins. Really nice for hacking out quick text manipulation scripts; not always nice for building large, maintainable software packages. (It doesn't help that there are usually a dozen ways to accomplish any one topic in Perl.)

Tools for C Programmers

gdb - The GNU debugger

A nice, text-based debugger for C (and some other languages). Sam will cover this later in the semester.