CS 444/544 Lab 3

CS 444/544 Lab 3

Please read this entire assignment, every
word, before you start working on the code.
There might be some things in here that make
it easier to complete.
This lab consists of one part. This lab is
October 18th by midnight. Submit a single
gzipped tar file to TEACH. The single gzipped
tar file should contain the all source files (C
source [*.c and *.h] and the Makefile).
Submitting your solutions before October 18th
will earn you a 10% bonus. You must have a
Makefile to build this assignment.
This assignment is NOT done in the xv6 environment. It
is done on os2.
Working with inodes – mystat (100 Points)
For this part of this assignment, you will write a C program that will display the inode meta data for
each file given on the command line. You must call you source file mystat.c and your program will be
called mystat. This program will run directly on os2, not within xv6.
An example of how my program displays the inode data is shown the Figure 4. You might also want to
look at the output from the stat command (the command not a system function, man section 1).
Though not as pretty (or in some cases as complete as the replacement you will write), it is the standard
for showing inode information.
Requirements for your program are:
1. The output of your program should look exactly like mine.
2. Display the file type (regular, directory, symbolic link, …) as a human readable string. If the file is
a symbolic link, look 1 step further to find the name of the file to which the symbolic link points.
If the file to which the link points does not exist, indicate that. See Figure 4.
3. Display the inode value.
4. Display the device id.
5. Display the mode as both its octal value and its symbolic representation. The symbolic
representation will be the rwx string for user, group, and other. See Figure 4 or ‘ls -l’ for
how this should look.
6. Show the hard link count.
7. Show both the uid and gid for the file, as both the symbolic values (names) and numeric
values. This will be pretty darn easy if you read through the list of suggested function calls. See
Figure 4 for how this should look.
8. File size, in bytes.
9. Block count.
10. Show the 3 time values in local time/date. This will be pretty darn easy if you read through the
list of suggested function calls. See Figure 4 for how these appear.

System and function calls that I believe you will find interesting include: stat()and lstat() (you
really want to do “man 2 stat” and read that man entry closely, all of it [yes really, all of it]),
readlink(), memset(), getpwuid(), getgrgid(), strcat(), localtime(), and
strftime(). Notice that ctime() is NOT in that list and you don’t want to use it. Since you must be
able to show the file type if a file is a symbolic link, I encourage you consider lstat() over stat().
My implementation is about 280 lines long, but there is some dead code in my file. I have code
commented out to support features not required for your assignment. There is no complex logic for this
application, just a lot of long code showing values from the struct stat structure from
sys/stat.h. Honestly, the longest portion of your code will likely be devoted to displaying the
symbolic representation of the mode. Formatting these strings is a little awkweird. I suggest you create
a function. Don’t worry about sticky bits or set uid/gid bits. Do you know what sticky bits are for or how
they used to be used?
You must to be able to show the following file types:
• regular file,
• directory,
• character device,
• block device,
• FIFO/pipe,
• socket, and
• symbolic link (both a good one and a broken one).
When formatting the human readable time for the local time, I’d suggest you consider this "%Y-%m-%d
%H:%M:%S %z (%Z) %a", but read through the format options on strftime(). The executable
version of my code is in the directory. You are welcome to run it to see the output.
I have some examples of both a FIFO/pipe, a socket, symbolic link in my Lab3 directory for you to use in
testing (the FUNNY*
files, Figure 2). You can
find a block device as
/dev/sda and a
character device as
/dev/sg0. See Figure 3.
You must have a Makefile that builds the mystat program, without any warnings from the
compiler. You must use the following gcc command line options (with gcc as your compiler) in your
Makefile when compiling your code:
Figure 2: The FUNNY* files.
Figure 3: Block and character files.
Figure 1: A sample of files to use for your testing. Found in ~chaneyr/Classes/cs444/Labs/Lab3

-g
-Wall
-Wshadow
-Wunreachable-code
-Wredundant-decls
-Wmissing-declarations
-Wold-style-definition
-Wmissing-prototypes
-Wdeclaration-after-statement
When we grade your program, we will issue the following commands to build your executable.
make clean
make all
There must be zero (0) warnings from the compiler. If your program compiles and produces warnings
(using the above command line options for gcc), then it is a zero.
Final note
The labs in this course are intended to give you basic skills. In later labs, we will assume that you have
mastered the skills introduced in earlier labs. If you don’t understand, ask questions.
For those of you have read this far and are actually reading the entire assignment, thank you. As a
reward, if you look at the section 2 man page for stat(), down near the bottom, I think you’ll like it.
That is:
man 2 stat

Figure 4: The inode information of the FUNNY files. Sorry the image is so small.
A directory.
A pipe.
A regular file.
A socket.
A symbolic link.
A broken symbolic link.