UNIX utilities

~ian Sat, Mar 22, 1997 (23:35) seed

A really nifty utility is "m4". It is a macro processor, which can do the same kind of things that the C preprocessor does, but you can do it with any text, not just C programs. m4 is more like the macro facility that is provided with assembly language, because an m4 macro can be a program that writes test. For example, one of the parameters to an m4 macro can be a repeat count that tells how many times you want the macro to generate a piece of code. As another example, an m4 macro can do a test to decide whether or not to generate any code. Although it takes a bit of practice to use m4, it is not a complicated tool -- the man page is only a couple of hundred lines. You can see some examples of m4 macros at http://www.iosphere.net/ian/personal/ddj1.html I use the standard UNIX version and the MKS version, but you can also get an extended GNU version.

~ian Mon, May 19, 1997 (22:12) #1

You can get a complete set of UNIX utilities for any PC (MS-DOS, Win 3.x, Win95, Win NT, OS/2) and for IBM mainframes (S/390 or P/390 running MVS/ESA , VM/ESA, or VSE/ESA). For the PCs, I recommend MKS Toolkit ( http://www.mks.com/solution/tk/ ). You can also get a less complete (but free) set of utilities if you use the GNU utilities ( ftp://prep.ai.mit/edu/ ). For mainframes, the utilites are included as part of the operating system software, in the "OpenEdition" ( http://www.s390.ibm.com/products/oe/ ), which IBM supplies with MVS, VM and VSE. The mainframe C compiler is an ANSI compiler, and I have ported code from UNIX to VM/ESA with only a very small proportion of changes, and plan to use OpenEdition for similar work in the future. My experience to date is that the commercial UNIX utitilies for non-UNIX computers provides a very portable working environment across a range of different platforms.

~CotC Tue, Jun 2, 1998 (12:32) #2

Check out the U/WIN package at www.kornshell.com There's also a port of the entire GNU development environment at www.cygnus.com, but I can't remember the exact URL. Just do a search for cygwin.