Unix Support and Troubleshooting

• Space problems (over quota)
  • Do "rm-junk" in your home directory.
  • Clean up C++ executables and compiler junk
  • Delete "solution" executables that you are given for labs etc.
  • "tar" and "compress" files, and possibly move them to your machine at home.
  • Keep copies at home of your completed projects
    

• Space problems (over quota)

• Do "rm-junk" in your home directory.

• This deletes all the "core" files and compiler cache files.

• Clean up C++ executables and compiler junk

• The makefiles generated by makemake include commands called "make clean" and "make realclean"
• "make clean" will delete all object files (.o files) and compiler junk.  "make realclean" will also delete executables created by makemake.  Executables are large (several MB) so it is good to delete them.  But if you want to run the programs again, you will have to rebuild them.  Deleting executables is usually safe because you will have the source code if you want to create them again - if this is not true for any reason, don't execute the find command given below!
  
• The command below will search for all files named "Makefile" and execute "make realclean" on them.
  
• Do "find . -name Makefile -exec make -f {} realclean \;" from your home directory.  Copy-paste this command, because it has to be exactly like this.  You may change the arguments "realclean" to "clean" or "Makefile" to "makefile" if those are what you need.  To understand the command better, use "man fnd"
• The command will give you lots of error messages - because some of the files don't exist, because some of your Makefiles will not be from makemake etc.  You can generally ignore them.
• Of course this will delete all the build files for any projects you are currently working on.  Just recompile.
  

• Delete "solution" executables that you are given for labs etc.

• These executables also consume a lot of space, and are not deleted by "make realclean".  You must delete them by hand.  Make a practice of cleaning up as soon as you find a lab or project submission.
  

• "tar" and "compress" files, and possibly move them to your machine at home.

• Use the command "tar" to create a single "zip"-type archive file of all your stuff.  "man tar" will tell you how to use tar.
• A typical usage is "tar cvf myfiles.tar file1 file2 ... dir1 dir2...".  This will  create a single archive containing the specified files, and the specified directories (recursively i.e. including all directory contents).  Make sure you clean up inside directories before you archive them.
• Tar does NOT compress files, so the tar file will be bigger than the original files.  You need to compress them by hand.  (If your account is already over quota, and you cannot create the tar file at all, you can create it in /tmp e.g. "tar cvf /tmp/myfiles.tar dir1 dir2...")
• There are two compression utilities on UNIX: compress and gzip.  Both are good.  If you are moving files to Windows, gzip may be slightly better, since pretty much all Windows programs can read GZIP files.  Th command is simply "compress filename" or "gzip filename".  The commands operate in place i.e. they replace the original with the compressed file.
• The tarred and compressed file may be easily moved to your home machine using ftp (has to be some secure ftp program, such as the "psftp" that comes with putty).  Remember to ftp in binary mode.  A simple alternative is to move the binary file to your "public_html" directory and use your browser to download.
• For those who do not know, if you create a directory called "public_html" in your Unix account, it becomes your dept website (index.html in that directory is your homepage).  Make sure the directory and all subdirectories have global read-and-execute permissions and that all files have global read permissions.
  
• The corresponding unpacking commands are "uncompress" and "gunzip".
• To extract files from a tar file, use "tar xvf filename".  Remember that will write the extracted files to the current directory.

• Keep copies at home of your completed projects

• It is a very good idea to keep copies at home of all the projects you do in courses here - they form a "portfolio" in case you need to show work samples to a future employer.