Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Wanted a  syllabus Unix for science students
Keywords: wanted syllabus Unix
Message-ID: <7686@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
Date: 10 Jun 89 20:18:50 GMT
References: <2360@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 30

In article <2360@botter.cs.vu.nl> wallagh@cs.vu.nl writes:
>At the University of Amsterdam the computerscience students have to
>learn Unix in there second year.

Learning about one specific operating system has been out of style for
some years in true computer science programs.  Teach them about
operating systems in general, and include ideas not only from UNIX but
from other operating systems as well.

If you must teach them only about a single operating system in one
course, that course really should to be optional, else you are making a
decision for them that you ought to be teaching them to make for
themselves.  Two similar courses I taught in the recent past included:

     High-level I/O versus low-level I/O; pipes; fork & exec family;
     I/O redirection; ctime, utime, time routines; interprocess
     communication using pipes and sockets; signals; interpreting info
     obtained from fstat.

The only sort-of suitable book available is by Marc Rochkind.
Unfortunately Rochkind assumes System V == UNIX.  Most of what he says
about 4.xBSD is in the preface.

You might want to include some shell programming.  I would include:
sh, csh (+ job control), awk, sed, test, e/f/grep, expr, and scripts
that use these.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
UUCP:    ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
Career change search is on -- ask me for my resume