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4 - UNIX System Utilities

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4 - UNIX System Utilities

Uploaded by

Godfrey
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4.

0 UNIX System utilities

4.1 Connecting to Remote Machines

 telnet machinename

telnet provides an insecure mechanism for logging into remote machines. It is


insecure because all data (including your username and password) is passed in
unencrypted format over the network. For this reason, telnet login access is
disabled on most systems and where possible it should be avoided in favour of
secure alternatives such as ssh.

telnet is still a useful utility, however, because, by specifying different port


numbers, telnet can be used to connect to other services offered by remote
machines besides remote login (e.g. web pages, email, etc.) and reveal the
mechanisms behind how those services are offered. For example,

$ telnet www.doc.ic.ac.uk 80
Trying 146.169.1.10...
Connected to seagull.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.1.10).
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 21:06:34 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 16:09:20 GMT
ETag: "23dcfd-3806-3a23d8b0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 14342
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Department of Computing, Imperial College, London: Home
Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
(etc)

Here www.doc.ic.ac.uk is the name of the remote machine (in this case the web
server for the Department of Computing at Imperial College in London). Like
most web servers, it offers web page services on port 80 through the daemon httpd
(to see what other services are potentially available on a machine, have a look at
the file /etc/services; and to see what services are actually active, see
/etc/inetd.conf). By entering a valid HTTP GET command (HTTP is the protocol
used to serve web pages) we obtain the top-level home page in HTML format.
This is exactly the same process that is used by a web browser to access web
pages.

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 rlogin, rsh

rlogin and rsh are insecure facilities for logging into remote machines and for
executing commands on remote machines respectively. Along with telnet, they
have been superseded by ssh.

 ssh machinename (secure shell)

ssh is a secure alternative for remote login and also for executing commands in a
remote machine. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure
encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network.
X11 connections (i.e. graphics) can also be forwarded over the secure channel
(another advantage over telnet, rlogin and rsh). ssh is not a standard system utility,
although it is a de facto standard. It can be obtained from http://www.ssh.org. A
good introduction page giving more background and showing you how to set up
ssh is http://www.tac.nyc.ny.us/~kim/ssh/.

ssh clients are also available for Windows machines (e.g. there is a good ssh client
called putty).

4.2 Network routing utilities

 ping machinename

The ping utility is useful for checking round-trip response time between machines.
e.g.

$ ping 192.168.0.1

measures the reponse time delay between the current machine and another macine.
ping is also useful to check whether a machine is still "alive" in some sense.

 traceroute machinename

traceroute shows the full path taken to reach a remote machine, including the delay to
each machine along the route. This is particularly useful in tracking down the location
of network problems.

5.3 Remote File Transfer

 ftp machinename (file transfer protocol)

ftp is an insecure way of transferring files between computers. When you connect to a
machine via ftp, you will be asked for your username and password. If you have an
account on the machine, you can use it, or you can often use the user "ftp" or
"anonymous". Once logged in via FTP, you can list files (dir), receive files (get and
mget) and send files (put and mput). (Unusually for UNIX) help will show you a list
of available commands. Particularly useful are binary (transfer files preserving all 8

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bits) and prompt n (do not confirm each file on multiple file transfers). Type quit to
leave ftp and return to the shell prompt.

 scp sourcefiles destination (secure copy)

scp is a secure way of transferring files between computers. It works just like the
UNIX cp command except that the arguments can specify a user and machine as well
as files. For example:

$ scp [email protected]:~/hello.txt .

will (subject to correct authentication) copy the file hello.txt from the user account
will on the remote machine rose.doc.ic.ac.uk into the current directory (.) on the local
machine.

4.4 Other Internet-related utilities

 netscape

netscape is a fully-fledged graphical web browser (like Internet Explorer).

 lynx

lynx provides a way to browse the web on a text-only terminal.

 wget URL

wget provides a way to retrieve files from the web (using the HTTP protocol).
wget is non-interactive, which means it can run in the background, while the user
is not logged in (unlike most web browsers). The content retrieved by wget is
stored as raw HTML text (which can be viewed later using a web browser).

Note that netscape, lynx and wget are not standard UNIX system utilities, but are
frequently-installed application packages

4.5 User Information and communication

 finger, who

finger and who show the list of users logged into a machine, the terminal they are
using, and the date they logged in on.

$ who
fredmug pts/2 Dec 5 19:41
$

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 write, talk

write is used by users on the same machine who want to talk to each other. You
should specify the user and (optionally) the terminal they are on:

$ write fredmug pts/2


hello fred

Lines are only transmitted when you press . To return to the shell prompt,
press ctrl-d (the UNIX end of file marker).

talk is a more sophisticated interactive chat client that can be used between remote
machines:

$ talk [email protected]

Unfortunately because of increasingly tight security restrictions, it is increasingly


unlikely that talk will work (this is because it requires a special daemon called
talkd to be running on the remote computer). Sometimes an application called
ytalk will succeed if talk fails.

4.6 Printer Control

o lpr -Pprintqueue filename

lpr adds a document to a print queue, so that the document is printed when the
printer is available. Look at /etc/printcap to find out what printers are available.

o lpq -Pprintqueuei

lpq checks the status of the specified print queue. Each job will have an associated
job number.

o lprm -Pprintqueue jobnumber

lprm removes the given job from the specified print queue.

Note that lpr, lpq and lprm are BSD-style print management utilities. If you are using a
strict SYSV UNIX, you may need to use the SYSV equivalents lp, lpstat and cancel.

4.7 Email Utilities

 mail

mail is the standard UNIX utility for sending and receiving email.

$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. Type ? for help.

Page 4 of 10
"/var/spool/mail/will": 2 messages 2 new
1 [email protected] Mon Dec 11 10:37 "Beanstalks"
2 [email protected] Mon Dec 11 11:00 "Re: Monica"
&

Some of the more important commands (type ? for a full list) are given below
in Fig. 5.1. Here a messagelist is either a single message specified by a
number (e.g. 1) or a range (e.g. 1-2). The special messagelist * matches all
messages.

? Help
q quit, saving changes to mailbox
x quit, restoring mailbox to its original state
t messagelist displays messages
+/- show next/previous message
d messagelist deletes messages
u messagelist undelete messages
m address send a new email
r messagelist reply to sender and other receipients
R messagelist reply only to sender
Fig. 5.1: Common mail commands

You can also use mail to send email directly from the command line. For
example:

$ mail -s "Hi" [email protected] < message.txt


$

emails the contents of the (ASCII) file message.txt to the recipient


[email protected] with the subject "Hi".

 mutt, elm, pine

mutt, elm and pine are more friendly (but non-standard) email interfaces that
you will probably prefer to use instead of mail. All have good in-built help
facilities.

 sendmail, exim

Email is actually sent using an Email Transfer Agent, which uses a protocol
called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The two most popular Email
Transfer Agents are sendmail and exim. You can see how these agents work
by using telnet to connect to port 25 of any mail server, for example:
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$ telnet mail.doc.ic.ac.uk 25
Trying 146.169.1.47...
Connected to diver.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.1.47).

4.8 Advanced Text File Processing

 sed (stream editor)

sed allows you to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (i.e. a
file or input from a pipeline). For example, you can delete lines containing
particular string of text, or you can substitute one pattern for another wherever
it occurs in a file. Although sed is a mini-programming language all on its own
and can execute entire scripts, its full language is obscure and probably best
forgotten (being based on the old and esoteric UNIX line editor ed). sed is
probably at its most useful when used directly from the command line with
simple parameters:

$ sed "s/pattern1/pattern2/" inputfile > outputfile


(substitutes pattern2 for pattern1 once per line)

$ sed "s/pattern1/pattern2/g" inputfile > outputfile


(substitutes pattern2 for pattern1 for every pattern1 per line)

$ sed "/pattern1/d" inputfile > outputfile


(deletes all lines containing pattern1)

$ sed "y/string1/string2/" inputfile > outputfile


(substitutes characters in string2 for those in string1)

 awk (Aho, Weinberger and Kernigan)

awk is useful for manipulating files that contain columns of data on a line by
line basis. Like sed, you can either pass awk statements directly on the
command line, or you can write a script file and let awk read the commands
from the script.

Say we have a file of cricket scores called cricket.dat containing columns for
player number, name, runs and the way in which they were dismissed:

1 atherton 0 bowled
2 hussain 20 caught
3 stewart 47 stumped
4 thorpe 33 lbw
5 gough 6 run-out

To print out only the first and second columns we can say:

$ awk '{ print $1 " " $2 }' cricket.dat


atherton 0

Page 6 of 10
hussain 20
stewart 47
thorpe 33
gough 6
$

Here $n stands for the nth field or column of each line in the data file. $0 can
be used to denote the whole line.

We can do much more with awk. For example, we can write a script
cricket.awk to calculate the team's batting average and to check if Mike
Atherton got another duck:

$ cat > cricket.awk


BEGIN { players = 0; runs = 0 }
{ players++; runs +=$3 }
/atherton/ { if (runs==0) print "atherton duck!" }
END { print "the batting average is " runs/players }
(ctrl-d)
$ awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat
atherton duck!
the batting average is 21.2
$

The BEGIN clause is executed once at the start of the script, the main clause
once for every line, the /atherton/ clause only if the word atherton occurs in
the line and the END clause once at the end of the script.

awk can do a lot more. See the manual pages for details (type man awk).

4.9 Target Directed Compilation

 make

make is a utility which can determine automatically which pieces of a large


program need to be recompiled, and issue the commands to recompile them.
To use make, you need to create a file called Makefile or makefile that
describes the relationships among files in your program, and the states the
commands for updating each file.

Here is an example of a simple makefile:

scores.out: cricket.awk cricket.dat


[TAB]awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out

Here [TAB] indicates the TAB key. The interpretation of this makefile is as
follows:

o scores.out is the target of the compilation


o scores.out depends on cricket.awk and cricket.dat

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o if either cricket.awk or cricket.dat have been modified since scores.out
was last modified or if scores.out does not exist, update scores.out by
executing the command:

awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out


make is invoked simply by typing

$ make
awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out
$

Since scores.out did not exist, make executed the commands to create it. If we
now invoke make again, nothing happens:

$ make
make: `scores.out' is up to date.
$

But if we modify cricket.dat and then run make again, scores.out will be
updated:

$ touch cricket.dat (touch simulates file modification)


$ make
awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out
$

make is mostly used when compiling large C, C++ or Java programs, but can
(as we have seen) be used to automatically and intelligently produce a target
file of any kind.

4.10 Version Control with CVS

 cvs (Concurrent Versioning System)

cvs is a source code control system often used on large programming projects
to control the concurrent editing of source files by multiple authors. It keeps
old versions of files and maintains a log of when, and why changes occurred,
and who made them.

cvs keeps a single copy of the master sources. This copy is called the source
``repository''; it contains all the information to permit extracting previous
software releases at any time based on either a symbolic revision tag, or a date
in the past.

cvs has a large number of commands (type info cvs for a full cvs tutorial,
including how to set up a repository from scratch or from existing code). The
most useful commands are:

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o cvs checkout modules

This gives you a private copy of source code that you can work on with
without interfering with others.
o cvs update

This updates the code you have checked out, to reflect any changes
that have subsequently been made by other developers.
o cvs add files

You can use this to add new files into a repository that you have
checked-out. Does not actually affect the repository until a "cvs
commit" is performed.
o cvs remove files

Removes files from a checked-out repository. Doesn't affect the


repository until a "cvs commit" is performed.
o cvs commit files

This command publishes your changes to other developers by updating


the source code in the central repository.

4.11 C/C++ Compilation Utilities

 cc, gcc, CC, g++

UNIX installations usually come with a C and/or C++ compiler. The C


compiler is usually called cc or gcc, and the C++ compiler is usually called
CC or g++. Most large C or C++ programs will come with a makefile and will
support the configure utility, so that compiling and installing a package is
often as simple as:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

However, there is nothing to prevent you from writing and compiling a simple
C program yourself:

$ cat > hello.c


#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("hello world!\n");
return 0;
}
(ctrl-d)
$ cc hello.c -o hello
$ ./hello
hello world!
$

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Here the C compiler (cc) takes as input the C source file hello.c and produces
as output an executable program called hello. The program hello may then be
executed (the ./ tells the shell to look in the current directory to find the hello
program).

5.12 Manual Pages

 man

More information is available on most UNIX commands via the online manual
pages, which are accessible through the man command. The online
documentation is in fact divided into sections. Traditionally, they are

1 User-level commands
2 System calls
3 Library functions
4 Devices and device drivers
5 File formats
6 Games
7 Various miscellaneous stuff - macro packages etc.
8 System maintenance and operation commands

Sometimes man gives you a manual page from the wrong section. For
example, say you were writing a program and you needed to use the rmdir
system call. man rmdir gives you the manual page for the user-level command
rmdir. To force man to look in Section 2 of the manual instead, type man 2
rmdir (orman -s2 rmdir on some systems).

man can also find manual pages which mention a particular topic. For
example, man -k postscript should produce a list of utilities that can produce
and manipulate postscript files.

 info

info is an interactive, somewhat more friendly and helpful alternative to man.


It may not be installed on all systems, however.

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