System calls and man pages

Back to teaching Operating Systems this year, and this time I get to tweak a bit of what I did last year. In the coming weeks, I'll be taking the students through some POSIX program internals. That means fun with system calls.

strace has proven useful to me in the past (though I'm not certain how much the students got out of it): it shows which system calls even a small program will make.

In the course of trying out some new exercises around strace, I discovered that the man pages for system calls aren't installed by default in Ubuntu. Loading them is just an apt-get away:

sudo apt-get install manpages-dev

I hope my students don't get a nosebleed. Nor me, either.