🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4h2ruj$hh@solutions.solon.com>,
Vincent Taijeron  <redleg1@foto.infi.net> wrote:
>I was wondering what would be a good "newbie" project.  What was one of 
>your first projects?  Looking for ideas.

Vincent,

My second program (after the canonical "hello, world\n" of course)
was writing a formatter similar to UNIX's pr. That's a filter program that
can add line numbers to listings, precede each page with a page header
and footer, break up long lines etc. I learnt a whole bunch of
basic techniques,

	- using argc, argv in option parsing with getopt
	- standard I/O with fgets, fprintf et al
	- dynamic memory (re)allocation to handle arbitrarily long lines
	- dealing with files of unlimited size
	- dealing with failures of various functions

That's quite a lot to start with. Looking back now, these techniques are in
almost any nontrivial program I write. I'd say some filter like pr makes
for a nice "newbie" project. Be sure to have your K&RII and manpages handy.

[Wow!  That's what I did.  I remember handing in a paper 2 days late, and
 explaining I needed to get my formatter debugged.  Mine did \bbold\B and
 \iitalic\I as well, at least, for the printer I owned. -mod]

Welcome to the C universe.

Bye, Jens

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