CS502 Project O

The shell is the Unix command interpreter. Although it is not part of the operating system, it makes heavy use of many operating system features and thus serves as a good example of how the system calls can be used.

From any CCC Unix account, try running the following commands in a new shell:

• ps
• ps -ef | more
• w
• ps -ef | grep <login-name>
• cat /etc/passwd | wc -l
• top
• tcsh
• xeyes &
• jobs
• fg
• (type Ctrl-C)
• man kill
• nfsstat
• nfsstat > file
• cat file
• getconf CS_PATH
• bash
• set
• exit
• tcsh
• set
• exit

To get help information about specific Unix commands, use the "man" command. For instance, entering "man tcsh" will display the manual page entry for the tcsh shell.

Try to find brief answers to the following questions:

• Which process was the most expensive on your system in terms of CPU utilization?
• How can you "kill" a process? (There may be more than one way).
• What does "fg" do?
• What does the character ' > ' do?
• How do you direct the output of a command into a file?
• How would you determine the default process priority ? Hint - "man getconf"
• How are "bash" and "tcsh" different?
• What shell is your default login shell?