Ask HN: Looking for a series on implementing classic Unix tools from scratch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560418

42 9 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

This can be blogs, books, or YouTube. I'm working on upping my C skills and have started to reimplement some tools like wc, cat, etc. I'm wondering if there are good walkthroughs out there for some of the more complex tools like sort, xargs, etc.

Any further advice on C for the 20 teens is also welcome.

totalperspectiv2• 7 years ago

For future travelers, these are the best resources I've seen so far: https://learnto.computer https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/be...

msie• 7 years ago

“Software Tools” by Kernighan & Plauger

vram223• 7 years ago

I've heard that book recommended a lot earlier, in various other good books or articles. Would like to read it. But not the original one in RATFOR, rather the second version in Pascal. Just checked on Amazon, there is a copy, but not in Pascal.

Update: Just found a used copy of the Pascal version on Amazon India, ordered it.

monadgonad• 7 years ago

Any further advice on C for the 20 teens is also welcome.

The book 21st Century C by Ben Clemens is worth a look.

aargh_aargh• 7 years ago

Read the source, but rather than the GNU variants, look at the *BSD ones. They're much more readable.

vram223• 7 years ago

I have been casually writing Python versions of such Unix tools (not with all the features and options, just the parts that I feel like or know how to do) off and on, for a while now, and often post about them on my blog, when I do write such tools. The union of the sets of posts at these two links:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/search/label/command-line

and

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/search/label/python

should have many such posts about versions of Unix command line tools implemented by me in Python.

Also, this tutorial I wrote years ago for IBM developerWorks may be of use, to learn some of the informally handed down but generally accepted principles and techniques for writing such command line tools in C:

Developing a Linux command-line utility:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-ar...

The post is an overview of the article I wrote for IBM, with some background about it, etc. For the actual code in C and the PDF of the IBM article, follow relevant links in the post, to more than one level, as needed.

totalperspectiv2• 7 years ago

Your posts are excellent! Thank you for sharing them!

vram223• 7 years ago

Thank you! You're welcome.

koots• 7 years ago

Hacker Tools MIT course Learn to make the most of the tools that hackers have been using for decades. https://hacker-tools.github.io

Ask HN: Looking for a series on implementing classic Unix tools from scratch

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