Instructor Notes On Project 0

Hello there! Some quick things to get out of the way:

• To create a handout tarball, run make handout
• If you add files that you want the students to receive, you need to modify the bottom of the Makefile to include them in the tarball.

Alright. Welcome to the repository for Project 0! This contains the main Project 0 files for CS439, as adapted from an exercise in OSTEP.

The advertised parts of the repository are pretty well-explored by the students, so let me give you some quick insight into the not-as-well explored portions.

Files of Note

Argprinter

This is primarily intended to help debug issues with passing argv in execv. Specifically, students often do one of the following:

• Clobber their argv entries before the execv call.
• Improperly terminate an entry in argv.
• Improperly terminate argv itself.

In all cases, the mistake usually becomes obvious if the exec-ed program prints out the arguments it got, but most programs do not do this. At best, they will print out a garbled fragment of an argument. The argprinter can be used to debug these cases.

Shellspec

For students who really prefer a short, succinct version of the spec, we have .shellspec.md which specifies the behavior of UTCSH in a breezy 150 lines.

I suspect what students really want is to be able to understand the spec without having to spend like 2 hours reading it, which I am sympathetic to, but doesn't really work well in this course...

Note: as of time of writing, this short-form is not included in the handout because it is what is known in the professional world as "a little troll."

Make Rules

There are several Makefile rules which are intended to assist in instructor workload or student debugging. These include:

make handout

Used to generate the handout for the students. Avoids putting in files like this one, or autogenerated stuff.

make grade

Used in grading (clearly). Prints the score to screen, as well as dumping a hidden file (.utcsh.grade.json) into the project directory. This hidden file can be parsed by a grading script to get info about points.

make fixtestscriptperms

Forcibly sets script permissions on all scripts in the test directory. Can be useful if people are transferring in data from Windows machines and execute bits are not being appropriately set.

Tooling In-Use

Obviously, you need copies of make and gcc in order to build the project.

Formatting for C files and header files is done by clang-format, with the default settings on the UTCS machines.

Markdown and JSON formatting is done using dprint. Python formatting is provided by black.