UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hey guys.... I'm new to the unix environment. I'm trying to formulate a code with which I'm clueless. I want to write a code to save file(s) which were copied into a separate directory in my home directory with copied files having the same permissions both before and after they were copied.

If anyone can send send a copy of an example to me, I would be most appreciative. Thanks in advance to anyone who is reading this....

Looking forward to your responses.

Not sure what you're trying to do... if you want to copy files from one directory to another and maintain their permissions, just use the cp command. But I'm hoping the question you're asking wasn't that simple....

what I'm really doing is C Programming, but in UNIX as it has a low level language compiler, with directories the Borland Compiler doesn't have. I wanted to create some files, copy them, and save them to a directory within my home directory, so, I was looking for a syntax to undertake that particular task. Thanks for the input...

You can use the stdio package to manipulate file. Do "man stdio" and then read the man page for each of the routines like fopen, fprintf, fclose, etc. And if borland doesn't have those available it is in violation of the c standard.

It doesn't make sense to copy a file that you are writing...just write the data twice.

Another approach is to use the system calls directly.. "man open", "man read" will get you started there.

The routines which you've listed, Borland already have those routines available. I'm aware that I can make the file twice, but, i wanted to get a copy of the syntax to undertake the task of creating, copying and saving the file.
Secondly, the the low-level header files which Borland doesn't suppport which I was referring to includes: "dirent.h" "sys/types.h" "fcntl.h"...

These headers aren't supported by the borland compiler, so I wanted a copy of a code to see how the file would be created, copied, saved and be accessed from a directory within a directory. In other words, am looking for a "c programming syntax" to undertake the task mentioned.

Well you already know how to create a file called "bob". To copy "bob" to "jack", you would just open "bob" read the data and write it to a file called "jack".

The dirent.h supports routines called opendir, readdir, closedir, etc. The all have man pages and a command like "man opendir" will show you how to use them. But you don't need them here. They would be used to scan an entire directory. When you open "bob", the kernel scans the directory for you.

After you open "bob", you can use "stat()" to get the permissions on the file. And again stat has a man page.

Syntax-wise these are all just functions, there is nothing special about them.