A Java Course Outline
Using the Java By Dissection book
by Ira Pohl and Charlie McDowell

Editing, Compiling and Running a Program on a UNIX System

This section contains general information about things you will need to know how to do in order compile and run your Java programs on a UNIX system.

There are many aspects to creating and running programs. Generally speaking three required basic steps are

• Enter the text of the program
• Compile the program with a compiler
• Run the compiled program

UNIX Editors

For the first step we use a editor. You may have several choices of editors available to you on your workstations: pico, emacs and vi are the editors most commonly used.

emacs

To run emacs simply type emacs at the UNIX prompt. On the sparcstations you should type emacs & (the ampersand will allow you to type additional UNIX commands in the xterm window because emacs will create its own window). It will tell you how to run the tutorial (Ctrl-h t) which you should do soon, though you can probably get through the first labs without it.

For the first homework assignment all you need to know is

• You can move around with the arrow keys
• You erase a character using the delete key
• You write your work to a file by typing Ctrl-x Ctrl-w and then putting in the file name
• After that you can save future modifications with Ctrl-x Ctrl-s
• You exit by typing Ctrl-x Ctrl-c
• On the Sparcstations, you can also use the mouse to move around, and menus to call many common commands (i.e., Save)
• Use Ctrl-g to cancel any command

pico

pico is probably the easiest editor to learn (it is very similar to pine). The set of possible commands is much more restricted though when compared to emacs. If you want to give the editor a try, just type pico at the prompt sign, and start typing your program.

Some very basic key sequences are

• Ctrl-g -- Help
• Ctrl-o -- Save the file
• Ctrl-x -- Quit

vi

Check out the UCSC webpage about Software: Vi

Compiling and Running a Program

These instructions are for the standard/free JDK from Sun Microsystems. You will use any editor and then run javac to compile your program and java to execute it as described below.

• After typing in your file, save it, either to a floppy or to hard disk.
• In the Command Prompt window, first cd to the directory containing your Java source file, e.g. MyClass.java. You compile a java program with javac MyClass.java.
• In the Command Prompt window, you run a compiled Java program with java MyClass (no extension) where MyClass is the name of a class that contains a method main().
• When you are done, be sure and save your work either on a floppy or use ftp to transfer the Java source files to your UNIX account.

There is an online tutorial, Nettrail, for learning about using The Web, e-mail, newsgroups, and Melvyl (the electronic library information system) at UCSC.