CHUKA UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

COSC 224: UNIX OS AND C PROGRAMMING (30/30 CF 3.0)

Lectures: 2 Hours per week; Practical: 2 Hours per week

Prerequisite: COSC 222

Purpose

To introduce students to the UNIX operating system environment and perform basic UNIX
administration tasks.

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students should be able to;

 Interact with both command line interface and X window of Unix environment.
 Describe the use of library functions and Unix commands.
 Design and implement a program in C language in the Unix environment.
 Use AWK, SHELL and PERL programming in a Unix operating system.
 Administer a Unix system using basic administration commands.
 Develop a program in C programming language in the Unix environment
Course Description

Comprehensive study of programming under the Unix operating system. language features,
program development, modularization, low-level I/O, system function calls, UNIX-specific
library functions, UNIX commands, programming environment and utilities; UNIX editors,
Extensive programming using C programming language, AWK, SHELL and PERL tasks

Weekly coverage

Week Topic
1,2 Introduction to UNIX operating system;
Interacting with files and directories;
3, 4 UNIX library functions;
UNIX Commands;
5, 6 Unix Editors;
Introduction of C programming in UNIX;
7 CAT 1
8, 9 UNIX system function calls;
Extensive programming in C

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10 CAT 2
11, 12, 13, 14 SHELL Programming; AWK programming; PERL Programming;
15 Revision

Evaluation

Continuous Assessments 30%

Ordinary Examination at end of Semester 70%;
References

1 Sumitabha Das (2006), YOUR UNIX: the ultimate programming Guide, 2nd ED McGraw-
Hill
2 Arnold D. Robbing (2011), Effective AWK programming: a user’s guide for GNU Awk, free
software foundation Inc.
3 Kirry R., Jacinta, R., and Paul, F., (2000), Programming perl, OReilly and Associates, Inc

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