My IBM developerWorks article: Developing a Linux command-line utility

By Vasudev Ram

I had written an article about Developing a Linux command-line utility for IBM developerWorks (IBM dW), some years ago. It was a tutorial on how to write Linux command-line utilities in C. It used a real-life Linux utility that I had earlier written [1], to show some of the techniques involved in writing such utilities for general-purpose use.

[1] I had originally written the utility for production use for one of the largest motorcycle manufacturers in the world.

The article was fairly well-received while it was on the site (for a long time) and received multiple four-star ratings (out of a possible five stars). It was viewed over 35,000 times. Since it was recently archived from the IBM dW site, I thought of putting up the article - as a PDF file [2], with the accompanying source code, in a project on my Bitbucket account, for the benefit of those interested in learning how to write Linux command-line utilities in C. The name of the utility was selpg (for select pages), so I named the project selpg on Bitbucket too.

[2] I got to know that the article had been archived from the IBM dW site, and wrote to them asking for a copy of the PDF of the article, which they kindly sent me.

Here is the selpg project on Bitbucket:

Developing a Linux command-line utility (selpg)

And you can get the article and all the source files here:

selpg source

In an upcoming post, I'll show a few practical uses of the selpg utility.

Enjoy.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises. Python, C, Linux and open source consulting and training.

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BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was cool

BCPL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BCPL preceded B which preceded C. I had the opportunity to read a book about BCPL, by the  creator of the language, Martin Richards, IIRC, years ago. I thought it was a damn cool language at the time. It was like a high-level assembly language. Very simple and clear. The only data type was (computer) words, IIRC - as in, a 16-bit word. You had to do everything in terms of words.