Unix System Programs

Assignment by Bhagyashree Pandit (UNIX Dec 2013 batch)

Q : Why did you do this programs?
Bhagyashree : As UNIX was in the syllabus of my last semester, Theory as well as University practical. So, sir (Dr Vijay Gokhale) told in class to refer Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment – By W. Richard Stevens (now referred as book), as it gives the practical idea of “The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach”.
So when I start reading this book, first I solved the practical assignments with the help of this book, after that sir told me to do programs given in this book, so I started solving the same and I finished the last chapter of the book last month only.

Q : How it helped you to understand UNIX operating system ?
Bhagyashree : Well, it’s worth in many ways. First, if you know UNIX, you can understand many other operating systems since UNIX seems to be as the base (or Mother ) of most operating systems (for eg: OSX ) and secondly, many servers runs on UNIX. Also, it is fun knowing stuff most people never heard of. It can never hurt to learn as much as your interest is peaked, since I am still a student.

Most importantly you realize ‘why’ we are doing the things inside the operating system as the way we are doing. While reading operating system algorithms in Bach, it always remains back of the mind that we have to provide ‘such and such’ system call to the application programmer using which application programmer is going to write his application.

And if application programmer is to get that built in behaviour via system call then operating system has to implement it. To implement that behaviour, all this is going on. That’s how the logical chain proceeds. That means as an application programmer, I just call a fork() to create a new process. While learning allocreg, attachreg etc. I keep that in mind.

Programs are uploaded here