Ex. No.

:1 STUDY OF UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM

AIM:
To study the basic concepts of UNIX operating system.

DESCRIPTION:

INTRODUCTION TO UNIX
Operating System is a collection of programs that act as
an interface between the user and computer by coordinating
the operations of hardware and software. Ken Thompson
and Dennis Ritchie designed a small multitasking system
which had a file system, a command interpreter and a set a
utility programs, line editing characters and numerous other
features. This new operating system is UNICS. This was
designed after MULTICS. UNICS is the acronym for
Uniplexed

Information Computing System, which was called as UNIX

in 1970.
 The important characteristics of UNIX operating system
compared to all other operating system are the fact that there
are many different flavors of the operating system. Since the
source code is available widely.
In IBM UNIX is named as ATX
In Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) UNIX is named
as ULTRIX
In Sun Microsystems UNIX is named as XENIX
Sun Microsystems sold XENIX to Santa Cruz Operation
(SCO)
SCO named it as SCO UNIX. SCO Open Server Release
5 and SCO UNIXWare 7 are the more up to date
version.

ARCHITECTURE OF UNIX

The UNIX operating system can be functionally

classified as,
 The Kernel
The Shell
Tools and Applications

User

User User

Hardware Tool & Applications

Shell
Kernel

User
User

User

The Kernel
 The operating system is generally called as the System
Kernel. The Kernel is the heart of the operating system,
which is a collection of programs written in C that directly
communicates with the system hardware. The UNIX kernel is
the software that manages the system hardware and software
resources as per the users request. The overall size of the
UNIX kernel is around 10,000 to 12,000 lines of program
code.
The kernel is a special program in the UNIX system that
gets loaded into main memory when the operating system is
booted and runs continuously until the UNIX system is
shutdown. The kernel provides utilities with the means of
accessing the machine hardware. It controls and coordinates
all the computer activities, schedules user jobs, decides
process priorities and acts as a protective layer surrounding
the hardware.
The kernel is responsible for managing the following sub
systems,
 Hardware Management
Process Management
Input / Output Management
File Management
Memory Management
The Shell
The shell is a utility program that acts as an interface
between the user and the operating system. The shell is a
program that acts as a command interpreter read lines typed
by the user and translates the requests in to actions passing
the commands directly to the kernel. All communicates
between the kernel and the user pass only through the shell.
The shell is a program that runs under the UNIX
operating system just like other ordinary programs, different
flavors of shell have been developed. Each shell differs
slightly in their features and their syntax of the command
language. Some of the most popular shells used in UNIX
systems are,
Bourne Shell
 C Shell
Korn Shell
Bash Shell
TC Shell
POSIX Shell
Z Shell

Tools & Applications

UNIX operating system includes wide variety of utility
programs, called as tools or commands. Most of the
commands are relatively small and simple that accomplishes
a single task or a group of related tasks. These tasks include
copying files, moving files, redirecting files, deleting files and
so on. The tools supported by UNIX are application oriented
packages like word processors, financial accounting,
electronic spread sheets, database management, compilers,
computer graphics, internet tools, other system related
software which makes UNIX a popular and favorite operating
system.
UNIX FEATURE
1. Multi User System
2. Multi Tasking System
3. Pattern Matching
4. Tool Kit
5. Programming Facility
6. System Calls and Libraries
7. Windowing System
8. Documentation
9. Portability
10. Open System

FILE SYSTEM ORGANIZATION

File system is one in which the operating system
organizes the data on the disk. A file system can reside on a
hard disk, with a UNIX partition. The Unix operating system
uses a hierarchically organized directories to keep track of
these files. Every file is assigned to a directory and a
directory can contain both files and/or directories. Each file
system is a separate section or segment on the hard disk. The
file system divides each hard disk drive into sequence of
logical blocks, depending upon the implementation of the
system.
These blocks are grouped into four types. They are,
1. Boot Block
2. Super Block
3. List Blocks
4. Data Blocks

The Directory Structure

All the files are grouped together in the directory

structure. The file-system is arranged in a hierarchical
structure, like an inverted tree. The top of the hierarchy is
traditionally called root (written as a slash / )
 In the diagram above, we see that the home directory of
the undergraduate student "ee51vn" contains two sub-
directories (docs and pics) and a file called report.doc.
RESULT:
Thus the basic concept of UNIX operating system is
studied.