1.4 But I don't know Unix!

Well, this is something that you have to learn on-the-fly. Even if I were to use DOS tools, there is no OS class for DOS! Besides, there is plenty of documents online for your reference.

First thing first. For the most detailed (and longest) document of the assembler itself, go to http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/manual/gas-2.9.1/html_chapter/as_toc.html. We will only use a fraction of the features, and a fraction of its support for the x86 architecture. Nonetheless, this is the best reference material as far as the tool is concerned.

Most Unix tools have online manuals. To access the online manuals, use the man command. The following is a command to view the manual of the ls command:

man ls

That's fairly painless, isn't it? In man, use `q' to quit. The home, end, page-up and page-down keys do what they should. To search for a pattern forward, use `/', followed by the pattern to search for, then ENTER. To search for a pattern backward, use `?' instead.

The following is a list of commonly used commands in Unix/Linux. You can use man to find out more about these commands:

• vim: a visual editor, difficult to learn, but very efficient once you get used to it. Visit http://www.vim.org for more information.
• nano: another visual editor, less difficult to learn, most beginners prefer nano to vim. Visit http://www.nano-editor.org for more information.
• ls: list the contents of a directory.
• cp: copy a file or directory to some place else.
• mv: move a file or directory to some place else. Als renames files or directories.
• rm: be careful with this one, it deletes files or even directories! Read the manual first before trying anything daring.
• mkdir: make a new directory.
• man: the manual viewer. Yes, you can read the manual of man using itself.
• as: our assembler. The manual does not include the syntax definition, just the command line options.
• ld: our linker.
• make: a utility program to automatically execute programs to create targets based on predefined dependencies.
• ps: lists processes.
• cat: concatenate files to an output. You can use it to view contents of a text file. Does not scroll!
• less: a text file viewer that allows paging and searching. man uses less as a frontend. If you know how to use man, you already know how to use less.