Software Tools in C

This is a look at the classic Software Tools in Pascal by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger (Addison-Wesley, 1981). It can still be bought at Amazon or may be found in your local library. See the book's blurb.

Going through the lessons may seem odd from a 2019 perspective, but I consider it a rite of passage. In this project most of the Pascal tools from the book will be recast as working C programs. Neither completeness nor fidelity is a goal.

My progress through the book, along with notes about the individual tools and their restatement in C can be found in doc/Tools.md. Notes not directly related to the book or the tools are in doc/Notes.md. And for a mythical view on the seemingly simplest tool of all, read The Unix and the Echo by Doug McIlroy.

Getting Started

Clone the repository and run make in the checkout directory. This will build the executable file in the bin/ directory. Run make check to run the unit tests. For all else, read the source.

Structure

While the book presents many separate tools, the implementation here builds a single binary that contains all the tools. To invoke a particular tool, pass the tool's name as the first argument. Alternatively, create a link to the one binary and name it for any of the tools; if the binary is invoked through this link, the tool name need not be specified as the first argument. (This is a common Unix pattern, employed e.g. by BusyBox).

Usage

For lack of a better idea the binary is called quux (see quux in the Jargon File). You may want to rename it. Usage example:

$ ./quux echo Hello
Hello
$ ln -s quux echo
$ ./echo Hello
Hello

Author and License

Written by UJR and dedicated to the public domain (read the UNLICENSE file or consult unlicense.org).