CSS 263/342/343 Software Information

Welcome to our collection of facts and links for various software that is relevant to our course.

Compilers

Microsoft's Visual C++ home page. If you use this compiler, make sure you've got the latest service packs.
There are some known Visual C++ bugs which have bitten CSS342 students in the past. Among them are a bug in getline(), causing it to read an extra character. Here is a third-party list of Visual C++ file fixes.
Visual C++ has "features" which can reduce portability to other compilers (depending on the version and patch level you are using). Here is one source of information about these issues.
The Free Software Foundation's GCC home page. They have their own list of known bugs (though I might note that none have affected any CSS342 students in the past, to my knowledge).
If you have a Windows machines and would like to use the g++ compiler, you can get it for free (along with all the other GNU programs: enough to make a Windows machine look like a Unix machine). It includes X server software that allows you to run programs on a Linux machine and have them display their GUIs on your desktop machine (see below for a standalone X server). This software is available on the Web at http://www.cygwin.com/ .
There is a free X server for Windows called Xming. It will allow you to log in to the CSS Linux lab and run Linux applications there that will open their GUIs on your Windows machine. Just like being there, only in your pajamas.
Besides basic navigation and file manipulation commands, the three most useful other Linux commands are probably:
tar xvzf gpquick.tgz
The tar command pre-dates the use of dashes to mark command options; the above is equivalent to tar -x -v -z -f gpquick.tgz. The 'x' option means to extract from the archive, 'v' is "verbose" (display the file names as they're being extracted), 'z' means that the archive is compressed, and 'f' indicates that the next argument is the name of the archive file (without that argument, tar defaults to looking for the archive on a tape drive, as befits it full name, "tape archiver").
tar cvf prog0.tar *.{cpp,h}
This use of tar creates a tar file called prog0.tar in the current directory, placing in it all files that end in either .cpp or .h. It's unlikely, but if your tar file for some program would turn out larger than 50KB, add the 'z' option to compress it and name the file with the extension .tgz. Neither Unix nor any of its commands care what file names or extensions are (you can have as many '.' in a file name as you like), but it's useful documentation for a human and is used by whatever GUI you have (Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X).
g++ -o prog0 *.cpp
Compile all of the files ending in .cpp and name the executable output file "prog0". Later, when we use templates, we'll need to specify the C++ files individually, but we'll worry about that then. You can reduce your typing a bit by creating a simple shell script. Please enter the following into a file, perhaps called build (or b, if you want to minimize typing), in the same directory as your source files:
```
#!/bin/sh

g++ -o prog1 a.cpp b.cpp d.cpp
```
Where, of course, you need to substitute your own list of .cpp files and the program name. Make the script executable by typing chmod u+x build (or whatever you called the file, if not build) at the command line. You can now compile your code by just typing build (or b).
Here is a copy of the g++ manual page, for those curious of the intricacies of compiling on the CSS Linux machines.

Secure Shell Clients

Our Linux machines do not support telnet/rlogin/rsh/ftp, as they are security risks. In a nutshell, those commands require you to send your login ID and password across the net unencrypted, for all to see. Additionally, everything you do while logged in using those commands would be unencrypted. Instead, our machines support secure shell (ssh), a program which allows you to connect with encryption. The C&C Unix machines also require ssh.

There are a number of client programs you can now legally use to connect via ssh, including:

MacSSH and NiftyTelnet SSH for MacOS 9 and less (MacOS X comes with a Unix ssh implementation),
Teraterm SSH (for Windows),
and a number of other implementations linked to via the abovementioned SSH Resource Page. You should also refer to the C&C UWICK or security web pages for local information about such software.

Other Software

We have a handy, one-page quick reference card for the emacs editor.
Here is the tar manual page, telling all about using this command to make a single file out of many. For the curious, "tar" is short for "tape archiver". If you are in a directory and want to create a tar file containing its contents, use "tar cvf ../tarfile.tar *" (note that we create the file in the parent directory; otherwise, the tar file will contain an incomplete copy of itself, and will get overwritten when un-tarred).
To obtain the GSview Postscript viewer and the Ghostscript Postscript interpreter, go to their home page. You will need both to preview under MS-Windows or Linux.

Return to the CSS342 home page.

Last modified: Wed Oct 10 10:14:38 PDT 2007