iu-coreutils

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These intend to follow a derivative of the original UNIX philosophy, with a heavy emphasis on simplicity and straightforwardness.

The iu philosophy can be found here

Installation

You'll need a C compiler with support for the C99 or C11 standard; and the make program. If you're on OS X, BSD, or Linux (or most POSIX systems) you probably already have these, so don't worry yourself.

• To compile one of the single utilities by itself: run make utility (obviously replace 'utility' with ls or cat or whatever)

If you want to be able to run the commands from anywhere, they'll need to be in your PATH environment variable. Thing is, you probably already have a program called cat and ls, etc. in your PATH. So, in order to override those conflicting programs, and use the iu coreutils, place the folder that you compiled the programs in to the beginning of your PATH, not the end.

Programs

cat - sequentially read specified files and output the contents (to stdout by default).

lnum - prepend line numbers to the input. can be used as a filter (e.g. cat file.txt | lnum), can be applied directly to files (lnum file.txt). Chooses stdin by default, when run with no arguments.

ls - lists files in the directories specified. -a option includes hidden files.

Code Base

The code base is simple and easy to understand.

• *.c - the actual programs for iu-coreutils
• include/ - headers for functionality that is shared throught the programs. This is told to the compiler, so you only need to use #include "[file_name].h" when file_name.h is in the include folder, rather than #include "include/[file_name].h"
• Makefile - the compilation automation system. Run make name to compile the program name.c
• .gitignore - a list of files for git to ignore (i.e the ones that don't need version control)

Philosophy

This is the [ 'philosophy' / 'guidelines' / 'rules' / 'regulations' / 'suggestions' ] that iu programs should follow. It is a work in progress.

• Do one thing and do it well.
• One program gets one C file.
  • Shared functionality between programs can be split between multiple file.
• Don't write the same function twice.
• Avoid #ifdef, #ifndef, and general preprocessor-ugliness
• Use comments often, whenever you think something might not be clear. Don't be pretentious about comment usage (i.e. "My code is self-documenting")