Prototyping 22 Jan 2013
Compilation, Free Software, and the Pipeline
Compile
In 1985, programmer Richard Stallman writes the GNU Manifesto, in response to his frustrations in how his programming work is controlled.
So far we have an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities. A shell (command interpreter) is nearly completed. A new portable optimizing C compiler has compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix. When the kernel and compiler are finished, it will be possible to distribute a GNU system suitable for program development. We will use TeX as our text formatter, but an nroff is being worked on. We will use the free, portable X Window System as well. After this we will add a portable Common Lisp, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things, plus online documentation. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and more. (bold has been added)
The Shell
wikipedia:Bourne_shell, wikipedia:Unix_shell
Bourne was later Bourne-again in the form of BASH (programmers do love their wordplay).
UNIX Philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
2003 Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming is published
Pipeline
Small tools loosely joined
Grep, and videogrep
Free Software
Script
In-class
Select a commandline tool and create a wiki page briefly explaining it and giving some simple cookbook examples. (If the page already exists for what you're interested in, you can also extend/improve it instead).