Operating System Shell Commands
Textbook: Modern Operating Systems, Chapter 1 (Sections 1.6–1.8)
Write a journal entry that will prepare you to conduct the organizational profile needed for your final project. In this lab, you will also apply the operating system concepts you read about in the course textbook to the real world.
Windows, Linux, and OS X provide command line utilities that display system architecture information as well as how the operating system is configured to interface with hardware. The goal of this lab is to leverage the operating system on the computer you are using for this course to report on its architecture.
Execute one of the commands below in the command shell that comes with your operating system. For example, if you are using Windows, you will run the systeminfo command. Here are the optional commands:
Windows: Execute the commands systeminfo & msinfo32
Linux: Execute the command cat /proc/cpuinfo
Max OS X: Execute the command system_profiler SPHardwareDataType
Review the output from a command above and, in your journal, describe the type of processor(s), number of cores, amount of memory, and any particular information you find interesting. For example, Windows displays the installation date and when the system was last booted. Linux displays the number of bogomips (unreliable CPU performance metric) for each processor or core. Of particularly interest from a historical perspective, Mac OS X will likely display an Intel processor running on Apple hardware.
In your journal, explain at least one system call from the course textbook that the operating system executed in order to create the output you reviewed.
Hint: Each of the commands above creates a new process, so Windows will leverage a WIN32 system call from Section 1.6.5 and Linux/OS X will execute a variant of one of the system calls listed in Figure 1-18.
