Learning Objectives

  • Who designed and implemented the original Unix operating system
  • Who wrote the first version of the UNIX shell
  • Who invented the B programming language (the direct predecessor to the C programming language)
  • Who is Ken Thompson
  • How does a shell work
  • What is a pid and a ppid
  • How to manipulate the environment of the current process
  • What is the difference between a function and a system call
  • How to create processes
  • What are the three prototypes of main
  • How does the shell use the PATH to find the programs
  • How to execute another program with the execve system call
  • How to suspend the execution of a process until one of its children terminates
  • What is EOF / "end-of-file"?