This is a place to record various command-line tricks and options I use in class. Due to a series of mis-translations involving 功夫 and Hollywood stereotypes, the “magic you can do on the command line” is traditionally called command-fu, command-line fu, script-fu, etc.

1 2018-10-15

• clear scrolls so the next line is the top line of the terminal window. It does not remove anything, just scrolls.

• cat hello.c dumps the contents of hello.c to the terminal window.

• clang -S hello.c the -S flag means “I want an assembly file, not a program” and generates hello.s instead of a.out.

  I also mis-typed -s instead of -S once. That means “strip” – i.e., remove all symbol table information from the binary (making it hard to link with other files and debugging hard, but the resulting file a bit smaller).

• cpp hello.c runs the C pre-processor on hello.c, outputting the resulting .c file to the terminal

• cpp hello.c | less runs the C pre-processor on hello.c, outputting the resulting .c file into the less program so we can scan through it.